Opening Up to Open Educational Resources | K-12 Blueprint

" Finding and Selecting OER

There are several OER sites with searchable databases of teaching and learning resources, including:

• OER Commons
• CK-12
• PBS Learning Media
• MIT Open Courseware
• Edutopia
• USDOE Open Education site

If you need help choosing OER resources, Jill Buban has some good advice. At a recent Cite conference, she explained the 4Cs of choosing the right OER for your institution. She suggested that when choosing an OER, it is necessary to think about copyright policies, the creative commons, course levels, and creativity. She also said that some questions to consider are whether or not the material is something that you as an educator want to reuse, whether it will work for all levels of your course, and how you can creatively manipulate the materials to provide your students with all different types of perspectives ( Buban, 2016 ).

Fostering the use of OER in K–12 and higher education will take effort and investment, including providing professional learning for educators to help them make these programs successful. But we’ve only begun to realize the potential impact and benefits for our students."