Introduction
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are research, teaching and learning materials that are free to use because they are in the public domain or have an open license. OERs are part of a movement to support equal access to education and lifelong learning for everyone. Many people, including educators, learners, and publishers are developing, adapting, remixing and sharing OERs. An OER is like a growing plant; each shared adaptation and remix is a new unfurling leaf making the OER plant more robust. Each new openly-licensed resource is like a new plant. The more robust and varied the OERs, the more sustainable the OER ecosystem. Learners can thrive in an OER ecosystem when we design OERs inclusively to benefit all learners.
OER How-to-Our Doors Course:
For community members and learners:
- Find Our Doors Are Open Course
- You can share it in your community.
- Use or adapt Our Doors for your community
- Adapt, remix, extend, modify an OER to better match learner contexts and needs. Include all learners, in particular, diverse and atypical learners, in the edit, remix, and creation of OERs.
- Make an OER
- Share back your resources with the learning community using appropriate open licensing
For educational resource authors, developers, and designers:
- Create resources so copies can be easily made, parts can be reused, and content can be edited
- Design using inclusive practices and consider the accessibility of each content type. The idea is to provide different ways for content to work better in more situations.
- Use open software and platforms available to learning and education communities
- Apply open licensing such as Creative Commons