Why open educational resources (OER)?
Blink Tower's winning entry in the Creative Commons Why Open Education Matters
video contest provides a succinct summary of why OER. (Although it's not clear if the video itself has a creative commons license.) OER is a response to counter the expense of educational resources and outdated textbooks. The two greatest benefits of OER are: (1) giving free access to more quality education resources to teachers and students; and (2) giving the power back to teachers and learners to make decisions about quality of educational resources and revise OER that align to their most essential learning competencies. Finding OER, curating OER, and creating OER are activities that benefit from collaboration, bayanihan, pagtambayayong.
Savings on textbooks can be reinvested toward professional development and learner-centered activities. As you consider OER, think of solutions to the following challenges presented by OER: (1) Quality assurance; (2) Sustainability; (3) Lack of public understanding; and (4) Relevance to local context.
For more information, watch the video Creative Commons Licensing.
Finding OER
Along with the explosion of OER resources, is the explosion of repositories. Finding the right resource that will align to a school's most essential learning competencies is akin to looking for needle in a haystack. Some of the more well-known repositories are:
Open Washington offers its OER Resource Repository by category: open images, open textbooks, open course materials, and open video & audio.
Curating OER
Once we have located OER, we then need to assess the OER. From the ISTE OER course, I learned about several rubrics that help with assessing OER. For example, Edreports.org looks at text quality, building knowledge, alignment, and usability rating. The Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) tier classification has non-negotiable criteria, for example for English language arts, (quality of text, text-dependent questions, coherence of tasks, and foundational skills) and other criteria (range and volume of texts, writing to sources, speaking & listening, and Language, assessments, scaffolding and support). I liked the Carlsbad Unified School District (CUSD) rubric as it empowers the teacher to decide on which resources make sense for their classroom and it provides opportunities for sharing and collaborative work. To understand the basis of the CUSD rubric, it is useful to review the work of the Achieve OER Rubrics/Equip which is based on a collaborative effort of education leaders from Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island; EdReports ELA 3-8 Rubric, and Grossmont Union High School District (GUHSD).
Philippine-Specific Resources
Some Philippine-specific resources to check out include:
Encouraging effective, inclusive, and equitable access to quality OER by
Melinda dela Pena Bandalaria, University of the Philippines Open University
This is a message from Mr. Mark Anthony Sy to the representatives of the training on Advanced OER, to the administrators, to all teachers.
Digital Learning Resources and Open Educational Resources
Primo G. Garcia from the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU) lectures on Digital Learning Resources and Open Educational Resources (OER) and covers Resourced-based learning and the role that digital and open resources can play in setting up student centred, activity based lessons.
UNESCO Philippines OER ICTCFT Project
This video outlines potential ICT in Education courses that might be adapted to create a similar course for Teachers in the Philippines
UPSILab
https://samplecontents.library.ph/New Paragraph
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mention the author Maria Beebe
https://www.kaisipan.org