 | |
| Owner | ISKME |
|---|---|
| URL | oercommons |
| Launched | 2007 |
OER Commons (OER for open educational resources) is a freely accessible online library that allows teachers and others to search and discover open educational resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials.
OER Commons, created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, was developed to serve curriculum experts and educators in discovering open educational resources (OER) and collaborating around the use, evaluation, and improvement of those materials. [1] Resources on the site can be searched and filtered using an expanded set of descriptive data, including conditions of use. Teachers, students, and others enrich this "metadata" when they tag, rate, and review materials, and share what works for them.
In 2007, with a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, OER Commons opened as a digital library and intermediary for openly licensed and freely available content. By aggregating resources and standardizing metadata from OER content providers, the site supports knowledge sharing and access to teaching and learning materials, strategies, and curricula online. Individual educators submit their own contributions which are curated. Materials are reviewed for quality and alignment to standards and shared primarily using Creative Commons licenses. [1]
In a second phase, beginning in 2009, ISKME developed an initiative for teacher professional development program to support educators in finding and using OER supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation. As part of its teacher training program, [2] ISKME trained educators from over 25 countries to use OER through workshops and summer academies, including ISKME's Teachers as Makers Academies. [3]
ISKME's OER research revealed how teachers’ exposure to OER, tools and professional development cultivates collaboration among teachers, as well as new conversations and reflection about teaching practices and roles. [4] Petrides et al., 2011 [5]
Furthermore, research conducted on the impact of teachers’ participation in ISKME's own OER training network revealed that engagement with OER reduced teacher isolation (Petrides & Jimes, 2010 [4] ), as well as expanded the role of teachers in becoming more active innovators as they shared, collaborated and learned from one another (Petrides et al., 2011 [5] ). This work also revealed the role that OER teacher champions play in sharing the benefits of OER with colleagues and supporting the knowledge sharing, collaboration, and use of OER in online OER communities (ISKME, 2008; [6] Petrides & Jimes, 2010; [4] Petrides et al., 2011 [5] ).
ISKME's OER research also explored OER as a vehicle for disseminating adaptable curricula that support learner-centric approaches to pedagogy. ISKME's evaluation of the Community College Open Textbook Project revealed that study habits improved when learners were able to interact with open course material, and that students’ use of open textbooks cultivated new, self-directed learning behaviors (Petrides et al., 2011 [5] ).
Finally, ISKME's research revealed the role that collaboration plays in supporting the creation of open educational resources. Specifically, ISKME's study of authors who created content within the open repository Connexions revealed how as content creation group size increased beyond one author, the probability that users stayed with Connexions (and continued to create content) increased with it (Petrides et al., 2008). [7]
ISKME's technology platform, tools, and metadata enhancement in its work with OER Commons are designed to support an open platform that serves as a knowledge base for content providers and platform developers, particularly related to accessibility and inclusive design. Metadata, data that describes a resource, and in the case of open educational resources, includes descriptors such as title, author, material type, and material license. Metadata standards provide a template for OER providers to share their resources with other providers. OER Commons receives feeds of OER in Dublin Core (DC), IEEE's Learning Object Metadata (LOM), and RSS. OER Commons provide targets to other providers to harvest content in these formats.
Partnered with the Inclusive Design Research Centre since 2010 to incorporate FLOE components into the OER Commons platform, ISKME's efforts combine OER discovery and enhancement tools and processes with FLOE's personalized network-delivered accessibility standards and tools.
In 2012, ISKME released Open Author, an authoring and remixing environment to support the creation and adaption of multi-media accessible OER and enable collaborative workflows of content reviewers and creators. The authoring environment produces OER that is accessible using a broad range of assistive technology devices such as screen readers.
To support user contributions, in 2010 ISKME released the OER-Connector browser plug-in on GitHub that enables users to add resources to OER Commons. [8]
To support interoperability, OER Commons is an experimental node in the Learning Registry, a joint US Department of Education and US Department of Defense initiative to support educational content and platform interoperability. [9]
The OER Commons contains custom curated resource collections, or microsites. Within a microsite, OER is presented in the context of customized taxonomies to categorize and describe relevant OER. In 2011, ISKME announced the Green Micro-site with Greek partner Agro-Know. It is an aggregation of sustainability-related learning resources and features interdisciplinary lesson plans such as STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art and Math) resources.
The OER Commons infrastructure facilitates evaluation of content and alignment to quality rubrics and standards. Starting in 2011, OER Commons provides an embedded Common Core State Standards alignment tool and Achieve OER Rubric to support state-level curriculum committees as well as individual instructors to review content for quality and alignment and to collaboratively address gaps in content collections. [10]
ISKME was named an Education Laureate by the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation in 2007 for OER Commons. [11]
In December 2010, ISKME was named a finalist in the Qatar Foundation World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) Awards for its OER Commons teacher professional development programs. [12]
In 2011, ISKME won the Award for Bodies which Influence Policy from the Open Educational Quality Initiative (OPAL), [13] a consortium that includes UNESCO, the International Council for Open and Distance Education, the European Foundation for Quality in e-Learning, and several European universities.
The United States' National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is an open-access online digital library and collaborative network of disciplinary and grade-level focused education providers operated by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. NSDL's mission is to provide quality digital learning collections to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community, both formal and informal, institutional and individual. NSDL's collections are refined by a network of STEM educational and disciplinary professionals. Their work is based on user data, disciplinary knowledge, and participation in the evolution of digital resources as major elements of effective STEM learning.
Openness is an overarching concept or philosophy that is characterized by an emphasis on transparency and collaboration. That is, openness refers to "accessibility of knowledge, technology and other resources; the transparency of action; the permeability of organisational structures; and the inclusiveness of participation". Openness can be said to be the opposite of closedness, central authority and secrecy.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
In US education terminology, a rubric is "a scoring guide used to evaluate the quality of students' constructed responses". Put simply, it is a set of criteria for grading assignments. Rubrics usually contain evaluative criteria, quality definitions for those criteria at particular levels of achievement, and a scoring strategy. They are often presented in table format and can be used by teachers when marking, and by students when planning their work. In UK education, the rubric is the set of instructions at the head of an examination paper.
OpenStax CNX, formerly called Connexions, is a global repository of educational content provided by volunteers. The open source platform is provided and maintained by OpenStax, which is based at Rice University. The collection is available free of charge, can be remixed and edited, and is available for download in various digital formats.
Curriki is an online, free, open education service. Curriki is structured as a nonprofit organization to provide open educational resources primarily in support of K-12 education. Curricula and instructional materials are available at the Curriki website to teachers, professional educators, students, lifelong learners, and parents. The majority of the resources on the Curriki site fall under a Creative Commons license. Educational materials are provided by the Curriki community and are peer-reviewed for quality and adherence to standards.
An open-source curriculum (OSC) is an online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified. OSC is based on the open-source practice of creating products or software that opens up access to source materials or codes. Applied to education, this process invites feedback and participation from developers, educators, government officials, students and parents and empowers them to exchange ideas, improve best practices and create world-class curricula. These "development" communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow structures.
OpenLearn is an educational website. It is the UK's Open University's contribution to the open educational resources (OER) project and the home of free, open learning from The Open University. The original project was part-funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. OpenLearn is a member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC).
Open education is an educational movement founded on openness, with connections to other educational movements such as critical pedagogy, and with an educational stance which favours widening participation and inclusiveness in society. Open education broadens access to the learning and training traditionally offered through formal education systems and is typically offered through online and distance education. The qualifier "open" refers to the elimination of barriers that can preclude both opportunities and recognition for participation in institution-based learning. One aspect of openness or "opening up" education is the development and adoption of open educational resources in support of open educational practices.
WikiEducator is an international online community project for the collaborative development of learning materials, which educators are free to reuse, adapt and share without restriction. WikiEducator was launched in 2006 and is supported by the non-profit Open Education Resource Foundation (OER). A variety of learning resources are available on WikiEducator: direct instructional resources such as lesson plans and full courses, as well as learning-support resources, such as individual school portals and funding proposals.
An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats that may be downloaded or purchased at little or no cost.
The Tufts OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, was a web-based publication of educational material from a number of Tufts University courses, providing open sharing of free, searchable, high-quality course content to educators, students, and self-learners throughout the global community. The Tufts OCW initiative encouraged the publication and free exchange of course materials on the World Wide Web. First launched in June 2005, Tufts OCW provided materials with strong representation from Tufts' health sciences schools, some of which were equivalent to textbooks in depth. All materials on the Tufts OCW site were accessible and free of charge. As Tufts OCW is not a distance learning program, no registration, applications, prerequisites, or fees are required and no credit is granted. Tufts ended funding for its Open Courseware initiative in 2014, and content on the Tufts OCW web site was removed on June 30, 2018.
A virtual learning environment (VLE) in educational technology is a web-based platform for the digital aspects of courses of study, usually within educational institutions. They present resources, activities, and interactions within a course structure and provide for the different stages of assessment. VLEs also usually report on participation and have some level of integration with other institutional systems. In North America, VLEs are often referred to as Learning Management Systems (LMS).
The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 2002. Located in Half Moon Bay, California, its mission is to make learning and knowledge sharing participatory, equitable, and open.
Open educational practices (OEP) are part of the broader open education landscape, including the openness movement in general. It is a term with multiple layers and dimensions and is often used interchangeably with open pedagogy or open practices. OEP represent teaching and learning techniques that draw upon open and participatory technologies and high-quality open educational resources (OER) in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning. Because OEP emerged from the study of OER, there is a strong connection between the two concepts. OEP, for example, often, but not always, involve the application of OER to the teaching and learning process. Open educational practices aim to take the focus beyond building further access to OER and consider how in practice, such resources support education and promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning. The focus in OEP is on reproduction/understanding, connecting information, application, competence, and responsibility rather than the availability of good resources. OEP is a broad concept which can be characterised by a range of collaborative pedagogical practices that include the use, reuse, and creation of OER and that often employ social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, empowerment of learners, and open sharing of teaching practices.
The UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration, otherwise known as the Paris declaration on Open Educational Resources, is a declaration urging governments to promote the use of open educational resources (OERs) and calling for publicly funded educational materials to be released in a freely reusable form.
Language MOOCs are web-based online courses freely accessible for a limited period of time, created for those interested in developing their skills in a foreign language. As Sokolik (2014) states, enrolment is large, free and not restricted to students by age or geographic location. They have to follow the format of a course, i.e., include a syllabus and schedule and offer the guidance of one or several instructors. The MOOCs are not so new, since courses with such characteristics had been available online for quite a lot of time before Dave Cormier coined the term 'MOOC' in 2008. Furthermore, MOOCs are generally regarded as the natural evolution of OERs, which are freely accessible materials used in Education for teaching, learning and assessment.
Online credentials for learning are digital credentials that are offered in place of traditional paper credentials for a skill or educational achievement. They are directly linked to the accelerated development of internet communication technologies, the development of digital badges, electronic passports and massive open online courses (MOOCs).
Open Educational Practices in Australia refers to the development, implementation and use of Open educational resources (OER), open access, open learning design, open policies, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to open up education in Australia.
Open educational resources in Canada are the various initiatives related to open education, open educational resources (OER), open pedagogies (OEP), open educational practices (OEP), and open scholarship that are established nationally and provincially across Canadian K-12 and higher education sectors, and where Canadian based inititatives extend to international collaborations.