Open Educational Resources |
On this page, we want to introduce you to some open-source projects that can help to cut cost of education while increasing quality and flexibility by customization.
These projects didn't suddenly appear on the Internet, they have a long history. At least as far as we know, they were never discussed with regard to the Thai public education system. We think that's a pity. Therefore, we put together some information from Wikipedia to offer an easy overview.
Open educational resources (OER) are learning materials that are freely available under a license that allows them ...
- to be reused - you have the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form;
- to be revised - you have the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself;
- to be remixed - you have the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new;
- to be redistributed - you have the right to make and share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others.
The term 'open educational resources' was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries.
Open educational resources include:
- Learning content: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
- Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.
- Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.
The following definition of OER has been proposed by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation:
OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
One report, the OLCOS Roadmap 2012, notes that there is no established definition of OER and prefers to identify three core attributes:
- that access to open content (including metadata) is provided free of charge for educational institutions, content services, and the end-users such as teachers, students and lifelong learners;
- that the content is liberally licensed for re-use in educational activities, favourably free from restrictions to modify, combine and repurpose the content; consequently, that the content should ideally be designed for easy re-use in that open content standards and formats are being employed;
- that for educational systems/tools software is used for which the source code is available (i.e. Open Source software) and that there are open Application Programming Interfaces (open APIs) and authorisations to re-use Web-based services as well as resources (e.g. for educational content RSS feeds).
More sources:
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