1 Open Educational Resources (OER)

The internet provides vast amounts of OER for use and reuse. This may be text, video, graphics or audio and is free of charge. It’s usually produced by educational institutions and published online to the general public for their immediate use or for repurposing according to the users’ needs. This fast-paced Short History of English , for example, was loaded onto YouTube by The Open University in 2011.

Short History of English

OER can also be created by individuals, so the production of OER is not exclusive to educational institutions although largely dominated by them.

In this course you will look at three institutional OER initiatives – MIT’s open courseware, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative and The Open University’s OpenLearn. You will get a flavour of how different OER initiatives design and present the content for their audiences.

You will also have the option to find, discuss and redesign some OER material. You can choose your audience for the material and redesign it to fit their needs.