This week we’ve been looking into the world of Open Educational Resources (OER). These are free learning and teaching resources available on the internet, and can be anything from materials to full courses. These can be extremely helpful when developing lessons and supplementary materials for your students, as most OER materials can be used as long as it is credited (“by attribution”).

OERs can be found through a variety of ways, most search engines allow you to search by license type (type “Creative Commons”) or there are OER repositories such as OpenLearn, MERLOT and many others. In those websites, you can simply search under keywords or by subject, and find a wealth of materials that could help support both you and your students. For example, a quick search in MERLOT gives 70 results:

Some OER sites to test out are:

• Merlot

  MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.

• Open University’s OpenLearn

  The Open University’s range of free educational courses and resources.

• Jorum

  Free learning and teaching resources, created and contributed by teaching staff from UK FE and HE institutions.

  XERTE

  Repository of e-learning resources created through the open source e-learning development tool called Xerte Online Toolkits.

   Excellence Gateway

• Over 6,000 expert resources throughout the education and training sector