Log on:
Powered by Elgg

Ken Ronkowitz :: Blog :: Open Educational Resources Commons

March 15, 2007

http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/286-Ope



The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) launched a site that gives educators and learners access to classroom materials at no
cost.

It's called OER (for Open Educational Resources) Commons at oercommons.org. There are a range of educational resources:
primary documents, complete course guides and syllabi, lectures, lesson plans, lab activities, and homework assignments
on a variety of topics.

The site has a good number of 2.0 features like user ability to add tags, ratings,
reviews, and comments to help others find their way through the 8000+ resources now listed. So it is content with some
social net mixed in too.

The site is really an aggregating site for materials. You'll see a lot of MIT's
OpenCourseware materials indexed here as well as material developed by faculty at Rice, Harvard, and the University of
California-Berkeley.

But you should not see this material as limited to higher ed, but as source for the K-20
community in areas like art, mathematics, science and technology. There are links for Primary, Secondary, Post-secondary.

Don't expect to
find a primary "course" though - most links from that area led to animations & video clips from sources
like PBS' NOVA program. It was annoying that, even though I had registered at OER, I needed to register at
another site to view a sample animation that was supplied by teachersdomain.org.

I clicked on "humanities" and got 1495 hits with all
kinds of things from Visual
Histories: German Cinema 1945 To Present, Fall 2003
, to Education For The New
Millennium
and Out Of Ground
Zero: Catastrophe And Memory, Fall 2005
.

Posted by Ken Ronkowitz

You must be logged in to post a comment.