Objectives and timing

This workshop module invites you to examine existing open educational resource (OER) projects and begin to explore and determine the time, human resources, and planning issues involved in the implementation of an open educational resource (OER) project.

Assessing and defining the needs of an OER project

What kinds of OER projects exist across the world?

An Open Educational Resource (OER) project can take many forms. In this section we’ll look at some examples of OER initiatives that have different purposes.

For example:

• An OER project can be designed by an educational institution to share its instructional materials. The MIT Open Courseware Initiative is a project of this type. http://ocw.mit.edu

• It can be a project designed to support a specific subject or discipline. The OER Africa AgShare project is designed to share agricultural education resources. http://www.oerafrica.org/agshare. NPTEL India is a project designed to provide access to learning resources for Engineering, Sciences and the Humanities http://nptel.iitm.ac.in

• It can be a project designed by a community-based organization to share free educational resources. The OER Commons is a project of this type http://www.oercommons.org/, as is Khan Academy http://www.khanacademy.org, and Mozilla's Drumbeat https://www.drumbeat.org/en-US/about/ 

• It can be a project designed to invite educators to work together to produce freely available educational resources. The WikiEducator project is a project of this type.  http://www.wikieducator.org/Main_Page

Exploring OER projects and their goals

In this section you will explore a selection of OER projects from various parts of the world with a critical eye, to determine:

• The purpose and objectives of the project

• The target groups or audiences for the project

• The kinds of OERs the project provides

• The technology requirements for using the OERs

• The value the OER project provides

Activity: Exploring OER projects and their goals

Use the table below to guide your exploration of three global OER projects. Complete the information in the table with short notes and be prepared to discuss your findings.