About

Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse, without charge. OER often have a Creative Commons or GNU license that state specifically how the material may be used, reused, adapted, and shared.

What are some examples of OER Materials?

• Full university courses, complete with readings, videos of lectures, homework assignments, and lecture notes.
• Interactive mini-lessons and simulations about a specific topic, such as math or physics.
• Adaptations of existing open work.
• Electronic textbooks that are peer-reviewed and frequently updated.
• Elementary school and high school (K-12) lesson plans, worksheets, and activities that are aligned with state standards.

What can I do with OER?

Here are some real-life examples of people using and contribution to OER.

• As a teacher, you could reuse and repurpose material for use in your own classroom., and augment your school's limited resources. A physics teacher could use video from an introductory physics class at MIT, or use interactive simulations from University of Colorado at Boulder's PhET project.
• You can learn about subjects that interest you, without cost and without needing to be near a school. A cross-country trucker listens to philosophy lectures from a UC Berkeley professor while he drives long stretches of highway.
• You can contribute to open math and science textbooks that will be used by students in South Africa.

The OER Commons Initiative: A Brief Background

ISKME created OER Commons, publicly launched in February 2007, to provide support for and build a knowledge base around the use and reuse of open educational resources (OER). As a network for teaching and learning materials, the web site offers engagement with resources in the form of social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing. OER Commons has forged alliances with over 120 major content partners to provide a single point of access through which educators and learners can search across collections to access over 24,000 items, find and provide descriptive information about each resource, and retrieve the ones they need. By being "open," these resources are publicly available for all to use, and principally through Creative Commons licensing, many thousands are legally available for repurposing, modifying and improving.

The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the idea that equitable access to high-quality education is a global imperative. Open Educational Resources, or OER, offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning through accessible content, and importantly, through embedding participatory processes and effective technologies for engaging with learning. By leveraging our technical infrastructure and developing teacher training models that facilitate participation with OER, the OER Commons project aims to grow a sustainable culture of sharing among educators at all levels.

Continuing its efforts to support the dynamic discovery and dissemination of teaching and learning content through the OER Commons platform, ISKME is developing training and professional development models to support teachers and schools in effective uses of online content and to meet the demands of 21st century learning. As a key part of the OER Commons initiative, we work directly with teachers and students to engage with learning resources through processes that involve continuous improvement, that require collaboration and social learning, and build expertise from within and from the bottom-up. We develop, facilitate, and evaluate educational programs including professional development workshops, forums, international teacher resource exchanges, online knowledge-sharing collaboratives, and online course materials. (See our project wiki for more details.)

OER Commons forges alliances between trusted content providers and creative users and re-users of Open Educational Resources (OER). In addition to content partnerships, OER Commons, and its creator, ISKME, builds strategic relationships in order to develop innovation and new research focused on OER, to advance the field of open education, and to build models for its sustainability.

Supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education created OER Commons as part of the Foundation’s worldwide OER initiative.

From content, to infrastructure, to policies, OER Commons would not be possible without the contributions of those individuals and organizations that have been working tirelessly to make open content for all a reality. We would especially like to extend our appreciation to the following organizations for their expertise, knowledge sharing, and advice. Together, we hope to make OER Commons a valuable and trusted resource for all learners.

Content Providers

OER Commons is based on alliances with providers of high-quality OER. Contact us to discuss your participation or for more information.

In addition to the growing number of individual authors of open materials, the following institutions and organizations provide high-quality content and are helping to build the network:

• Alexandria Archive Institute Open Context
• Archive.org
• ArsDigita University
• BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium
• Broadcast Education Association, BEA Syllabus Project
• Calisphere, California Digital Library, UC Berkeley
• Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
• Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
• Connexions, Rice University
• CUNY, Center for Media and Learning, American Social History Project
• DLF Aquifer
• Dolan DNA Learning Center
• Drexel University, Math Forum
• Education Development Center/Center for Children and Technology
• Encyclopedia of Earth
• Federation of American Scientists Learning Technology Project
• FHSST (Free High School Science Texts)
• Foothill De Anza College, Sofia
• Fordham University, Internet Modern History Sourcebook
• George Lucas Education Foundation, Edutopia
• George Mason University, Center for History and New Media, History Matters
• Harvard University Law School, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
• Harvard University Library Open Collection Program
• Itrainonline
• Johns Hopkins School of Public Health OpenCourseWare
• KQED Education Network
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory/Center for Science and Engineering Education
• LEARN NC
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare
• Math Open Reference
• Monterey Institute for Technology and Education
• NASA (NASA KSNN, NASA CONNECT, NASA SCI Files)
• The National Science Digital Library
• New York Times Learning Network
• Notre Dame OpenCourseWare
• Open University OpenLearn
• Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Qedoc
• Science Education Resource Center (SERC), Carleton College
• Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Syracuse University Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises
• TakingITGlobal, TIGEd
• Teachers Without Borders
• TERC
• The Tech Museum of Innovation
• Thirteen / WNET
• Tufts University OpenCourseWare
• United Nations University
• University of California Museum of Paleontology
• University of California Berkeley
• University of Colorado, Physics Education Technology (PhET)
• University of Hong Kong
• University of Southern Queensland Australia Opencourseware
• University of Wisconsin Parkside
• US Environmental Protection Agency
• USASBE US Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship
• Utah State University OpenCourseWare
• WGBH / Teachers’ Domain
• WGBH Open Vault
• WikiEducator, Commonwealth of Learning
• Wikiversity
• Why Files, University of Wisconsin
• Yale University, Open Yale Courses
• ZeroBio

Strategic Development and Outreach Partners

In cooperation with the institutions and organizations below, OER Commons is working to advance awareness of Open Educational Resources through outreach and educational efforts focused on OER use, reuse, and community.

• BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium
• European SchoolNet (EUN)
• Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)
• Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE)
• Agricultural Learning Repositories Task Force
• Foothill DeAnza Community College District
• Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET)
• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
• Mills College
• University of California Irvine
• Connexions, Rice University
• Creative Commons
• Teachers Without Borders
• NYC Department of Education
• Open Knowledge Foundation
• UNESCO
• Google Grants
• The Shuttleworth Foundation
• William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

ISKME (www.iskme.org) is an independent, nonprofit institute that helps schools, colleges, universities, and the organizations that support them expand their capacity to collect and share information, apply it to well-defined problems, and create human-centered, knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success. ISKME achieves this goal by conducting social science research and evaluation, developing innovation, and facilitating field building.

Since its founding in 2002, ISKME has been at the forefront of knowledge innovations in education. For example: ISKME published the first monograph on knowledge management in education, called Knowledge Management in Education: Defining the Field, which has been downloaded by thousands of people in over 80 countries; and ISKME has helped to formulate and advance a research agenda for education focusing on continuous improvement, open educational resources, the use of student achievement data, the development of cultures of inquiry, and the use of knowledge for decision-making -- issues that have now become common goals if not yet common practices in education.

ISKME's OER initiatives transform how educators and learners engage with each other in participatory improvement of teaching and learning. With its expertise in building innovations, infrastructure and partnerships to facilitate knowledge sharing, ISKME assists in catalyzing teachers and learners to shift from a consumer culture for educational resources, to one in which they have the leadership and support to adapt and develop resources for their own needs, and then share those resources with others. This is a model in which open source technologies and open content truly make it possible to blend the role of teacher and learner.

In 2007, ISKME was named an Education Laureate by San Jose Tech Museum (http://www.techawards.org/laureates/stories/index.php?id=168) for its development of OER Commons, an open teaching and learning network.