Open educational resources (OERs) can save you valuable time and energy in creating teaching materials. They’re freely available for use in the classroom, and you can modify and adjust them to suit your students. OERs can also make it easier to diversify and personalize your curriculum, facilitating innovative teaching styles like flipped learning.
But how can you find high-quality open educational resources to augment your teaching?
Our guide runs through where to find great resources, how to evaluate which ones might suit your students, and how you might integrate them into your classroom.
Key Takeaways
- OER repositories and databases collate user-generated content and materials from leading publishers and institutions for you to use and adapt for free.
- You might evaluate resources by considering their terms of use, accessibility, ease of adaptation, and whether they meet local and national standards.
- Carefully chosen OERs can help you deliver more engaging and inclusive education.
- OERs that meet open standards can be integrated seamlessly into digital assessment, saving you significant time, effort, and money.
Where To Find High-Quality OERs
There are several different kinds of OERs freely available online. Leading sources include:
OER Commons
This library of digital resources lets you search a database of user-generated teaching content. You can search by subject, resource type, level, or educational standard (for example, “Minnesota math standards” or “Oregon art standards”). Hubs allow groups of educators to collate material relevant to them.
MERLOT
Merlot is another resource library, drawing on a community of over 222,000 members to gather a wide range of digital materials. Examples include a virtual chemistry lab, a collection of audiovisual resources in foreign languages, and an online course on cardiology. Community portals allow members to chat and share tips.
OpenStax
This non-profit arm of Rice University provides OERs across a number of subjects, including business, computer science, and nursing. Some materials are available in Spanish and Polish. It also gives access to free, digital K-12 textbooks that you can customize and supplement with other resources like quiz questions and lecture slides.
LibreTexts
Members of LibreTexts build and maintain free textbooks that other educators can borrow and tweak. Its 17 subject-specific libraries house over 2,000 digital books. You can also assign homework from LibreTexts’ ADAPT platform, drawing on an extensive question bank.
TedEd
The educational offshoot of the popular TED platform offers a database of mainly video-based lessons. You can also create your own lessons using existing TED animations, TED talks, or YouTube videos, adding discussion topics and quiz questions to keep your learners engaged.
OER Knowledge Cloud
This valuable site stores research and information about OERs to help you get to grips with how to use and develop online resources. It also links to many different OER repositories, so if you haven’t found what you’re looking for in the databases above, you’ll have even more ideas.
How To Evaluate OER Repositories
When searching for the right OERs for your classroom, you might consider the following:
- Are the resources all freely available, and are you able to adapt them as wished within the terms of use?
- Do the resources align with your local and/or national education standards? Could you adapt them to do so?
- Are materials up-to-date?
- Are the resources accessible? For example, does video content come with the option for subtitles for deaf or hard-of-hearing students?
- Can you download the resources, or do they need to be used online?
- Do you have the technical ability to edit the resources?
- Are the resources user-generated or published by an educational institution? Are the resources curated or vetted in some way?
The Advantages of Using OERs
Using OER libraries like the ones linked above can give you access to a wide variety of free resources that you can easily integrate into your teaching. The benefits can include:
Saving time and effort
OERs can save you hours of work in preparing classroom resources. For example, OpenStax’s digital textbooks come with slides and quizzes that you can easily deploy alongside the book for a ready-made lesson. You don’t need to duplicate the same work that thousands of teachers are also doing for the same topic.
Saving money
OER are freely available, meaning you won’t need to dip into your school’s budget (or your own) to provide interesting materials for your students.
Increasing accessibility
Using OER can help make your lessons more accessible through the use of multimedia. For example, TedEd’s brightly colored animations can support students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) or English language learners (ELLs) to digest complex topics with supportive visuals. Additionally, many OERs allow you to customize resources, so you can adapt aspects such as the font size to suit student needs.
Diversifying the curriculum
Platforms like OER Commons and MERLOT bring together educators from around the world. This can help you bring more diversity into your classroom as you can draw on a wider range of resources and ideas.
You can also use OERs to support innovative teaching styles like flipped learning and self-directed study. For example, I’ve used digital textbooks to support students with home study before diving into more detailed activities like creative presentations in the classroom.
Integrating OERs and Digital Assessment
OERs can also help you deliver effective digital assessments with less hassle. With open-source assessment platforms, interoperability with other software is key.
For example, TAO is a QTI (Question and Test Interoperability) standard-compliant platform. This means any question content made to this open standard integrates seamlessly with TAO, saving you the effort of designing new quizzes from scratch.
Similarly, TAO adheres to the LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) standard, meaning apps and tools that also meet the standard can form part of your assessment suite within the platform.
When exploring potential OERs for your classroom, you might want to look for QTI and LTI standard-compliant tools and materials so you can plug them into your digital assessments for easy test design. TAO then allows you to gather and analyse results from across different forms of content so you can gain a holistic understanding of student progress.
In Summary
Using OER can make a big difference to your teaching practice by saving you significant time and effort, not to mention money—but you will need to make sure that the resources you choose are suitable for your students, both in terms of accessibility and meeting your local and national standards.
When researching high-quality OERs, look for curated databases, adaptable textbooks, and multimedia content, like that provided by online sources like OER Commons, MERLOT, OpenStax, LibreTexts, and TedEd.
Understanding open standards can be a useful next step if you want to explore further ways to integrate digital resources into your curriculum. You might also consider exploring e-assessment communities, where members share further resources and best practices.
Learn More About Digital Assessment With TAO
OERs can make designing and delivering digital assessments even easier. But choosing the right assessment platform is important: an open source provider like TAO, with inbuilt interoperability, makes it possible to integrate other digital tools and resources without the hassle.
To learn more about how TAO can help you harness the power of digital assessment for your classroom, schedule a demo.
FAQs
What makes a good OER?
A good OER should be easy to find, use, and adapt. Its licensing and terms of use should be clearly marked, and it should have a clear and useful description to allow you to understand if it’s suitable for your classroom.
How can teachers use OERs effectively?
Teachers can use OERs effectively by making sure resources are relevant for their students’ levels of progress and learning needs. They should also be matched to the relevant curriculum and educational standards, accurate, and up-to-date. With these relevant resources in hand, you can build interactive lessons, encourage self-directed study, or personalize resources to make sure lessons are fully inclusive.
