Open Educational Resources are a critical part of access to higher education.  Open Educational Resources have three primary components:

1. Open content
2. Open source software
3. Licensing to support OER

  Read the Wikipedia definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) here.  Read the definition and the first section only on Defining the Scope and Nature of Open Educational Resources.

Now that you have a bit of information on what OER are, watch the following video for a brief overview.

The concept of Open Education is larger that Open Educational Resources.  Open Education has no admission requirements, is typically offered online, and is designed to remove barriers and enable full and open access to education.

A great explanation regarding OER is posted on David Blake’s YouTube Channel.  David Wiley did the voice recording and editing. Degreed sponsored the animation, which was done by Mike Moon and produced by Haugen Creative.

 View this video.  Remember to jot down notes on each section as you watch the video.

There are many organizations that are dedicated to supporting both OER and Open Education.  One among them is the Open Education Consortium.  Their mission is to:

…promote, support and advance openness in education around the world.

One of the most important elements to support OER is the development of Creative Commons licensing.  Creative Commons (CC) licensing enables content creators to reserve partial rights to their work.  Before CC licensing, authors had the option to either reserve all rights, or keep the full copyright to their works.  Now, authors and content creators can decide how they want to share their content.

 View the below video on Creative Commons.  

 

You can also review some common development tools that are either free or freemium and that you can use to create content.