Open educational resources

 Open Educational Resources (OER) 

              In 2002 the Education Program of the Hewlett Foundation introduced a major component into its strategic plan Using Information Technology to Increase Access to High-Quality Educational Content. This review1 begins with this plan as a baseline. Hewlett program officers were motivated to initiate the component after thoroughly examining content for K through 12 and post-secondary levels and finding it “alarmingly disappointing.” In 1992, when the World Wide Web was launched, open information resources rapidly became freely available, although they were of widely varying quality. With rare exception, the available materials neither promoted enhanced learning nor incorporated the latest technological and pedagogical advances. Educational institutions and publishers, lack of quality assurance for the content, and information overload also impeded the educational impact. During the 1990s, the funding for information technology in education primarily emphasized access to computers and Internet connection and the basic literacy for their use. The intent of this new Hewlett Foundation program component was to catalyze universal access to and use of high-quality academic content on a global scale. In the spirit of the work of Nobel economist Amartya Sen2 , the plan is intended to be a strategic international development initiative to expand people’s substantive freedoms through the removal of “unfreedoms”: poverty, limited economic opportunity, inadequate education and access to knowledge, deficient health care, and oppression

         Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. It is the leading trend in distance education/open and distance learning domain as a consequence of the openness movement

Benefits of OER

              OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.3 Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

MIT OCW

The flagship of the OER investments is the MIT Open Courseware Project .This world-changing project emerged from MIT faculty and administrators who asked themselves the following question: “How is the Internet going to be used in education and what is our university going to do about it?” The answer from the MIT faculty was this: “Use it to provide free access to the primary materials for virtually all our courses. We are going to make our educational material available to students, faculty, and other learners, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.” Atkins chaired an in-depth review of the OCW project in the fall of 2005 and Brown serves on the OCW advisory committee. The OCW project at MIT has created a very successful, compelling, living existence proof of the power of high-quality open educational resources. It is a pioneering project that has now become a catalyst for a nascent open courseware movement in service of both teachers and learners

•      less expense for students

•      showcasing of innovation and talent

•       quick circulation

•       continually improved resources

•      Scalability

•      expanded access to learning

•      enhancement of regular course content