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OER Commons
| Developing an Education Ecosystem Using Knowledge SharingOverviewOpen Educational Resources, or OER, offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning through accessible content, and importantly, through teacher-led knowledge sharing processes. By developing structures for sharing, the aim for OER is to bring more participants into a more fair and level playing field for learning. |
Our Approach
Created by ISKME, OER Commons (www.oercommons.org) is a free teaching and learning network, bringing together over 25,000 educational resources available for anyone to use. Resources on the site can be searched and filtered using a rich set of descriptive data, including terms of use. Teachers, students, and others enrich this "metadata" when they tag, rate, and review materials, and share what works for them.
Why OER? Access to Education is a Right
ISKME’s participation in the global “Open Education” movement over the last four years is rooted in the idea that equitable access to high-quality education is a social right. Additionally, we believe that enabling teachers and learners to be “makers” and “doers”, including making learning content and sharing teaching experiences, builds needed vital competency skills.
Although there is great deal of content on the Internet, OER provides new freedom of access. With OER, educators are free to use, adapt, remix, and share resources, legally, to fit their needs. Many educational institutions are developing new economic and pedagogical models around shareable and customizable learning content.
| In 2007, ISKME's Open Educational Resources initiative, OER Commons was honored by The Tech Museum of Innovation's Tech Awards: Technology Benefiting Humanity. |
Currently Underway
OER Commons is helping transform how K-12 teachers and college faculty view their roles in collaborating around the development and improvement of educational materials from kindergarten through college. Teachers are participating in workshops that use OER Commons as a resource for building new curriculum. Many are energized when they find they can download resources for free, modify them however they like, and write reviews and comments about what works best—so other teachers can benefit from their expertise. Through OER Commons, sustainable and innovative approaches to learning are shifting the nature of education as we know it.
In our Professional Development programs, ISKME trains teachers to use, create, and collaborate using OER materials, Web 2.0 social networking processes, while integrating them into generative, interdisciplinary, or socially relevant pedagogies and subject matter.
We seek to partner with schools, districts, county boards of education, regional and state initiatives, and teacher education centers at colleges and universities to develop and offer training programs and support.
For details about OER click on links:
- Visit the OER Commons wiki to learn more about ISKME’s OER research and educational program
- Download ISKME's OER Professional Development brief program description.
To Learning More
Please contact info@oercommons.org about participation and partnering in knowledge sharing and open educational resources: