Open Educational Resources (OER)

Next generation challenge aims to develop personalized courseware that improves outcomes for low-income postsecondary students.

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) promotes the awareness and adoption of open educational policies, practices, and resources. We believe that these practices will expand student access to education while supporting academic freedom and faculty choice of openly licensed curriculum materials. Our membership includes over 250 colleges in 21 US states and Canadian provinces. CCCOER is part of the global Open Education Consortium.

ISKME’s open and distributed knowledge sharing tools accelerate problem-solving and propel change in all facets of education. ISKME creates and facilitates open knowledge networks that support the use of information sharing and collaboration. Their open knowledge networks include the award-winning OER Commons initiative, a community of 25,000 teachers, students, and self-learners that has curated over 50,000 open educational resources, aligning them to standards, evaluating their quality, and sharing them via social networks. See more about their higher education project: http://www.completionmatters.org/

The Open Education Consortium is a worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions and associated organizations committed to advancing open education and its impact on global education. We envision a world where everyone, everywhere has access to the education they need to build their futures. We seek to instill openness as a feature of education around the world, allowing greatly expanded access to education while providing a shared body of knowledge upon which innovative and effective approaches to today’s social problems can be built. The Open Education Consortium realizes change by leveraging its sources of expert opinion, its global network and its position as the principal voice of open education.

Education is the key to economic, social and environmental progress, and governments around the world are looking to improve their education systems. The future of education in the 21st century is not simply about reaching more people, but about improving the quality and diversity of educational opportunities. How to best organise and support teaching and learning requires imagination, creativity and innovation.

Educational materials are an important output of the research process, and SPARC believes that Open Educational Resources (OER) maximize the power of the Internet to improve teaching and learning, and increase access to education. SPARC supports the creation and sharing of open materials used in teaching, as well as new approaches to learning where people create and shape knowledge openly together, and promotes practices and policies that advance this vision.

UNESCO believes that universal access to high quality education is key to the building of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue. Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building.

We believe that educational opportunities should be available to all learners. Creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials, assessments, and data publicly available without charge or restrictive licenses.

Since 2002, the Hewlett Foundation has worked with OER grantees to improve education globally by making high-quality academic materials openly available on the Internet. The Education Program continues to work toward establishing a self-sustaining and adaptive global OER ecosystem and demonstrating its potential to improve teaching and learning.