Keeping Connected with OER
In addition to campus workshops, programs, and opportunities for community-building, the following are excellent conduits of ‘all things OER.’
VIVA Open
“The VIVA Open and Affordable Course Content Initiative investigates and supports sustainable educational resource and access models that enable equitable and inclusive learning, give faculty control over instructional materials, and lower the costs of higher education for Virginia students.”
SPARC Listserv
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education.
OER Digest
The OER Digest is a bi-weekly newsletter for open education updates, opportunities, and reminders. The primary audience is the OER community in the United States and Canada, although subscribers come from all around the world. New editions are published every other Thursday. The Digest is a joint project of SPARC, the Student PIRGs, and Creative Commons USA.
“Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.”
OER Commons describes a movement to define OER. “The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. The Open Education Movement is not just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensed content; it’s about participation and co-creation. Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning content through engaging educators in new participatory processes and effective technologies for engaging with learning.”
“Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.”
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
The Hewlett Foundation defines OER as “open educational resources (OER), which are high-quality teaching, learning, and research materials that are free for people everywhere to use and repurpose.”
CCCOER is part of Open Education Global. As a community of practice for open education, we provide resources, support, and opportunities for collaboration for learning, planning, and implementing successful open educational programs at community and technical colleges. Sign up here to join CCCOER’s community of practice email group.
Open Education Week was launched in 2012 by
Open Education Global as a collaborative, community-built open forum. Every year OE Week raises awareness and highlights innovative open education successes worldwide. OE Week provides practitioners, educators, and students with an opportunity to build a greater understanding of open educational practices and be inspired by the wonderful work being developed by the community around the world.