Open educational materials

Open Educational Materials

OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER)

OER (Open Educational Resources) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any format, digital or otherwise, and include a wide variety of resources: textbooks, complete courses, images, infographics, videos, assessment activities, and any other educational material designed for use in teaching and learning.

They are freely accessible and can be reused (used, adapted, redistributed without restrictions or with limited restrictions according to the open licence under which they are distributed, as most are offered under some form of Creative Commons licence. 

In fact, the difference between OER and any other type of educational resource is its licence, since open educational resources incorporate a licence that facilitates their reuse without the need to request prior authorisation from the author or rights holder.

Infographic REA: Recursos Educativos Abiertos 

Where to find OERs? 

There are various resources that facilitate access to OERs:

At the national level:

Procomún (network of open educational resources): platform where you can find learning resources classified and catalogued in a standardised way (LOM-ES) and under Creative Commons licences.

At the International level:


How can we reuse located OER? 

You can use them:

  • As is, without making any modifications. In this case, always remember to attribute the authorship of the material you use.
  • Readapt them to create derived resources, adapt them to other contexts, or translate them into other languages. Confirm that the original material has an open license allowing readaptation with or without commercial purposes (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA), and remember to mention the original authors.
  • Create new resources, if you use an existing one as a base or inspiration. Confirm that the original material has an open license allowing the creation of a derivative work and whether it requires you to assign the same license to your new work as the original (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC). Additionally, do not forget to cite the original authors.

OTHER EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

Open Course Ware (OCW)

OCW is an international initiative, promoted by MIT, that provides open and permanent access to learning objects and digital teaching materials created by teaching teams worldwide. The main goal is to share knowledge among teachers, scholars, students, and the general university and non-university community. These educational resources are usually presented in the form of subjects or thematic courses with open access. They do not require enrollment. Typically, they include teaching materials, exercises, exams, and recommended bibliography for each subject. Additionally, most of them have Creative Commons licenses that allow their use. If you want to know exactly what uses you can make of a specific material, check the type of license under which it is published.
If you are a teacher, the materials you find can help you:
  • Planning your subjects: materials usually include the syllabus, pedagogical objectives, etc.
  • Create and update the contents of your subjects: materials usually include audiovisual content, documents, recommended bibliography, resources of interest, etc.
  • Create pedagogical activities for your subjects: materials often include exercises, tests, quizzes, practice, etc.

The library recommends you:

Nationally:

  • MDX: (MDX) it is a cooperative resource that offers materials and digital resources from the network’s member universities (Universitat de Barcelona, Autònoma de Barcelona, Politècnica de Catalunya, Pompeu Fabra, Universitat de Girona, de Lleida, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Universitat Jaume I and Universitat de Vic). Most of the materials are openly accessible, although some are restricted to users from the universities. Among other methods, you can access them by communities and collections or by subjects.

Internationally:

  • MIT OCW: A repository of teaching and learning materials prepared by the university community of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
  • The Open Education Consortium: The Open Education Consortium’s platform involving over 100 universities from across the world which openly and freely share teaching and study materials.
  • OCW Europe: A European platform with universities that participate in the Open Education Consortium.

MOOC (Massive Open Online Course)

Acronym for Massive Online Open Courses, these are distance courses offered over the internet, free, and open to anyone interested and willing to enroll; however, they are not always offered under an open license that allows the reuse of their materials. MOOCs are not permanently active but are launched or activated on specific dates. They require registration, although it may be free. Some institutions offering these courses provide accreditation to individuals who have completed them and wish to receive it. 

Today, there are also NOOCs, or Massive Open Online Nanocourses. These are short-form educational modules that share the philosophy of MOOCs but are much briefer in duration.

To look for MOOC courses created by universities all around the world check the following platforms:

  • Miríada X: it offers free online courses in Spanish and Portuguese. It has been promoted by Latin American universities.
  • Coursera: it offers free online courses mainly in English and Spanish. It is a platform with over 130 international institutions, mainly universities from the United States
  • Futurelearn: promoted by the Open University in the United Kingdom. It offers free online courses, mainly in English.
  • edX: promoted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in conjunction with Harvard and Berkeley universities, among others. It offers free online courses, mainly in English.

Micro Mooc 2019

Free online course on open science in which the Mondragon Unibertsitatea Library participated in collaboration with 16 other universities from all over Spain, the Spanish National Research Council, (CSIC), and 5 European collaborators. It was promoted on Twitter during the International Open Access Week, and you can explore the following thematic lines: