Open Educational Resources (OER)

Educators have taken advantage of the Internet to share their teaching materials with colleagues around the world.  There is now an increasing amount of free online resources to support open education.  Below are selected resources about open education and open educational resources. 

General discussion

Democratizing Access to Knowledge: Find Out What Open Educational Resources (OER) Have to Offer

This is an overview of open education, open educational resources, and the related licensing issues. 

A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER)

This guide was prepared for the Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO. 

Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources

This is an OECD study of open education resources.

Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge

This is a collection of essays about education in the digital age. 

Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities are Opening Up Access to Their Courses

This report addresses issues related to making university courses freely available online. 

Directories, Repositories, and Search Engines for OER

ccLearn (Creative Commons OER Page)

This page presents a list of OER repositories. 

Google OCW/OER Search

This is a search engine for higher education OER. 

iTunes U

It provides access to free recordings from different higher education institutions. 

National Repository of Online Courses

This site provides free course content for higher education and high schools. 

OER Commons

This is a portal of free teaching and learning materials. 

OpenCourseWare Consortium Courses

It indexes free online courses from different higher education institutions.

World Lecture Hall

This is an entry point to free online course materials from around the world. 

National/Regional Initiatives

China Open Resources for Education (CORE)

Paris Tech Libres Savoirs (France/Paris)

IREL-Open Project (Ireland)

Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium

Institutional Initiatives

Carnegie Mellow Open Learning Initiative

Connexions (Rice University)

MIT OpenCourseWare

Open Michigan (University of Michigan)

Open Yale Courses

Tufts OpenCourseWare

Utah State OpenCourseWare

Open University Pages

African Virtual University

Athabasca University

Open Universiteit in the Netherlands

Open University (U.K.)

Discipline-Specific OER Pages

Exploratories (Brown University)

It deals with java applets for teaching concepts in computer graphics.

Harvard Open Collections

It provides access to six subject specific-collections.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Open CourseWare

It offers access to the content of the School's most popular courses.  

OYEZ Project

Hosted by Chicago-Kent College of Law, this is an audio archive of U.S. Supreme Court materials. 

Sites for Multimedia Educational Resources