Open Education Resources

Open Education Resources (OERs) are digital replacements for textbooks available under some form of Free license, such as Creative Commons. There are many projects to create OERs, including the Sugar Labs Replacing Textbooks project, and projects of state and national governments, NGOs, professional associations, and individual contributors.

Most OERs are PDFs of existing content, including printed textbooks, but there are also innovative projects to produce interactive OERs using a variety of software, including Sugar, Logo, and Smalltalk, and to rethink educational content based on research into child development and computers in education. Much more research and development will be needed in this direction.

Globally, there is a need for OERs in several hundred subjects. Each country needs about 100 for 12 grades, usually divided into semesters, with five subjects taught at a time. Local content is needed for topics such as health, history, geography, literature, civics, and agriculture in more than 190 countries, some of which can share large portions. Materials for learning to speak, read, and write numerous languages are needed.

External Links

Sources

• The Librarian Chick catalog of free digital education resources

• The California Free Digital Textbook Initiative

• The Shuttleworth Foundation's Free high school science texts

• legeopentextbooks.org/ College Open Textbooks

• MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching)

• Waveplace OERs for Haiti

• College Open Textbooks Community

• Commonwealth of Learning

• Open Education Resource Foundation

Discussions

• UNESCO WSIS Platform of Communities Open Educational Resources (OER)

• World Bank Zunia OER discussion