About OER Commons

OER Commons is the first comprehensive open learning network where teachers and professors (from pre-K to graduate school) can access their colleagues’ course materials, share their own, and collaborate on affecting today’s classrooms. It uses Web 2.0 features (tags, ratings, comments, reviews, and social networking) to create an online experience that engages educators in sharing their best teaching and learning practices.

The emergence of OER signals the growing trend toward openness for teaching and learning materials.

Our Mission

The mission of OER Commons is to expand educational opportunities by increasing access to high-quality Open Educational Resources (OER), and facilitating the creation, use, and re-use of OER, for instructors, students, and self-learners.

Objectives

OER Commons reaches its mission through the following objectives:

• Use: To provide a single point of access through which educators, students, and all learners can search, browse, evaluate, download, and discuss open educational resources (OER) that are freely available online.
• Re-Use: To expand opportunities for those who use open educational resources to develop and submit high-quality content for others to use and localize.
• Community: To broaden opportunities for educators, students, and self-learners to exchange information about, create standards for, and otherwise define, improve and evaluate the quality of open educational resources available on the Internet.

What are OER?

Open Education Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student, or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world.

Re-use and adaptation of OER by educators bring new potential to support individualized teaching and learning, personalized networked services, and collaborative innovation across institutions and academic disciplines

About OER Commons Partners

OER Commons represents the joint efforts of the wider OER community and facilitates the growth of the OER movement. From content, to infrastructure, to policies, OER Commons would not be possible without the contributions of many individuals and organizations that have been working tirelessly to make open content for all a reality.

OER Commons offers improved access to and development of high-quality Open Educational Resources; it does not create or house the learning materials themselves. Open Educational Resources that can be accessed on OER Commons are created, developed, housed, and maintained through institutions, collections, and authors that are partnering with OER Commons. In addition, OER Commons is actively engaged in encouraging institutions, archives, and creators to open their educational resources for all to use, with appropriate and well-defined conditions of use and re-use.

See Partners for a full list of content partners and to learn more about our partnerships. To discuss becoming a partner or for more information, email us.

About ISKME

OER Commons is created and produced by ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. It is generously supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and represents dozens of collaborations with OER partners and communities across the globe.

ISKME is an independent, non-profit educational think tank whose mission is to understand and improve how schools, colleges, and universities, and the organizations and agencies that support them, build their capacity to systematically collect and share information, apply it to well-defined problems, and create knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success—whether through the use of assessment data to improve classroom instruction; the use of professional development to catalyze change; the use of evaluative findings to improve programs and policy; the use of research to engage practice; or the use of open education content to advance learning opportunities for all learners.