Faculty Instructional Technologist

Open Educational Resources (OER)

5. History of OER

The term ‘Open Educational Resources’ (OER) was first adopted at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Defined as ‘materials offered freely and openly to use and adapt for teaching, learning, development and research’.

What does OER stands for?

Digital materials that can be re-used for teaching and freely distributed under Open Licenses.

The 4 R’s of OER are:

“Reuse” – use all or part of a work for our own purpose,
“Redistribute” – share the work with others,
“Revise” – change the form of the work to suit our needs, and
“Remix” – take two existing resources and combine them.

What is OER?

Open Content

Open Educational Resources

Open Courseware (OCW)

Used for publicly available materials that are either a part of, or a complete course from an educational institution such as a university or college.
Free and openly licensed, accessible to anyone, anytime via the internet.

How and where did it start?

MIT in 1999, a group of faculty came together to examined the most effective ways to deliver in. In 2001, MIT announced that it would make its courses for free on the Internet. Since then, the inception of “Open Everything” began and exploded with other higher ed institutions.

OCW Consortium – a free and open digital publication of high quality college and university‐level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content.

Connexions – a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.

Carnegie Mellon University (mainly in the Sciences)

Sofia Course Gallery (useful for Arts & Computer Science)

Harvard Medical School

Stanford Engineering

University of Michigan