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
Countries
- Bangladesh is the first country we know of to digitize a complete set of textbooks for grades 1-12. Resources listed below.
- Uruguay is seeking up to 1,000 digital learning resources in a Request For Proposals (RFP). The Sugar Labs Replacing Textbooks program is planning to offer some to them.
- South Korea has announced a plan to digitize all of its textbooks and to provide all students with computers.
Sources and Directories
In no particular order. Please add more if you find them. How do these facilities compare with one another?
- Curriki free and open K-12 resources
- The Librarian Chick catalog of free digital education resources
- The California Free Digital Textbook Initiative at high school level
- MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching)
- LeMill Web community for finding, authoring and sharing open educational resources in multiple languages
- OpenCourseWare Consortium at university level
- Math Links - educators sharing interesting resources around the teaching and learning of mathematics
- OER Recommender 110,000 listings
- Bangladesh National e-Content Repository in Bangla. Story: PM opens e-content repository. 30,000 teachers, 148 government organisations and 50 local and foreign non-government organisations. 50,000 pages, planned to increase to 5,000,000.
- e-Book ::. ই-বুক জগতে স্বাগতম in Bangla. Story: PM opens online version of textbooks Access to Information (A2I) Project of the PM’s Office and the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) jointly transformed 33 primary level and 73 secondary level textbooks into e-books in collaboration with the UNDP.
- Florida Standards - resources - collection of links to reviewed OERs - some are commercially created, some are open
- 150 Free Textbooks - list by subject, many are high school (Grades 9-12)
Commercial Publishers of OERs
It's true. Free OERs plus paid services.
- CK-12] Primary and Secondary
- Flatworld Knowledge College