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Open-access software tools and free-use materials are available via the Creative Commons Attribution license  to facilitate collaboration and sharing. At Connexions, instructors can easily collaborate on OER development in a variety of roles including coauthors, maintainers, workgroup members, suggesters, and users of derived copies. Instructors can update their OER course material and make it available for distribution quickly.

Owl institute

In addition to providing users with connections to OER resources and communities, the OWL Institute Portal to provides the opportunity for users to develop and share their own OER resources. Contact the Owl Institute to receive "creator" or "teacher" access to courses and pages.

Digital universe

The Digital Universe seeks stewards and voluntary consultants to assist in their efforts "to organize the sum total of human knowledge and make it available to everyone."

Le mill

Tour Le Mill to find a variety of open learning materials. Join the Learning Mill community to contribute and share your own learning materials. FAQs describe how to use the site.

More tools

OLCOS, the UK's Open Learning Content Observatory Services project contains a 30 minute tutorial about how to produce OER . This tutorial provides information and practical tasks in creating and modifying open content in open process as well as formats that can be published as open educational resources and tools, that support this process. Wikieducator promotes collaborative authoring and use of OER by providing tools using wiki technologies such as eXe .  The Wikideducator  Content Development Project  is an opportunity for educators to contribute and share their OER. Wikibooks Wikibooks  is a Wikimedia project that started in 2003 with the goal to create a free collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. Since its inception, volunteers have written over 25,000 modules in a multitude of textbooks. If you're an instructor planning on using Wikibooks for a class project, read guidelines for class projects . Take a tour of the Instructional Architect , a service of the National Science Digital Library, to find out how you can use it to find discipline-specific OER, organize and modify those resources into activities for your students, and make those new activities available to a variety of audiences.  ccMixter is a community music site provide opportunities to collaborate with others to re-purpose and mix existing learning materials licensed under Creative Commons. Send2Wiki is a new tool that lets users easily send a copy of a webpage to a wiki for remixing. Wikia are provides free wiki hosting designed expressly for promoting reuse of open content with the MediaWiki software. All content on Wikia is perpetually licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Activity

Experience

Creative commons

Use Creative Commons to search for learning materials that you are free to use, remix, repurpose, etc.

Wikieducator

Watch a short video about how to create an account at Wikieducator .  Register for your account. 

Oer commons

  • Join OER Commons. Go to the OER Commons website, then click on Join Now.
  • Click on Start My OER Portfolio.
  • Visit Shared Portfolios posted to the OER Commons website to see to see how others search, use, and interact with OER.

Reflect

Post to your course Discussion area in response to the following questions:

  • What is the best way to promote development of OER among educators?
  • Who should be responsible for ensuring that OER are developed with ADA Section 508 accessibilty requirements in mind?

Apply

Merlot

Wikibooks

Connexions

Create a module to share at Connexions .

  • After registering, review the New Author Guide .
  • You can import a Word document or use the Connexions Edit-in-Place tool to create your module.

Review questions

  • What are some of the resources you can use to remix, repurpose OER, and develop your own OER?
  • What is necessary to ensure compliance with ADA Section 508 accessibility laws when developing OER for electronic dissemination to student?

Resources

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Source:  OpenStax, Introduction to open educational resources. OpenStax CNX. Apr 17, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10413/1.3
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