Open Educational Resources (OER)

 

 

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning tools like textbooks, lesson plans, and other media that are in the public domain or openly licensed, meaning that use you can freely use and adapt them. Unlike online resources that are free but not openly licensed, you can adapt OERs as much as you like to your own needs, which makes them an infinitely flexible tool."

What's so great about OER, http://www.edudemic.com/guide-open-educational-resources/

To build, to disseminate and to learn knowledge are the first mission of university.

A lot of universities offer free educational resources to the world: the Open Education Consortium include 250 universities (amongts them MIT et KU Leuven), the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching offers more than 56.000 resources, the OER Commons proposes more than 50.000 OER, OpenLearn and more...

When choosing Open Education, University of Louvain has joined some of those initiatives. Discover the Louvain OER platform.

What is an OER?

Handouts, books, videos, audios, exercises, case studies, quizzes, evaluations, online courses... As soon as those materials are digital, they become likely to be shared with other learners or teachers or citizens from any place of the world. Every of those can feed the Louvain OER platform.

With a very simple drawing, OERs can be described as follow (drawing extracted from Piedra N. et Al, 2010)

Conceptual map explaining OERs

Unlike a MOOC or a course on Moodle, OERs are

  • static
  • accessible at any time
  • without assessment procedure
  • without certificate
  • fit with an individual and autonomous initiative (no tutoring)

Articles about OERs