Got time and creative talent? Help the education sector with OERs

If you are a creative nut who wants to make the world a better place, you may want to channel your energy for the education sector by creating open educational resources or OERs. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization or UNESCO define OERs as “any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video, and animation.” Some examples of OERs are the notes and videos uploaded on the internet for free by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm)

As a creative, you can do a lot with OERs. You can create your own from scratch and put it in the public domain so that educators and students can reuse it for free. You may also help educators review OERs by adapting, adjusting, modifying, or changing the OERs through translation or localization to better fit the background of the students. You can also do a remix by combining or doing a mash-up of several OERs to come up with a new OER about a topic. Lastly, you can give others the right to redistribute your work, so that it can be used and mashed-up with other OERs.

Sounds easy right? Yes, but there are also challenges. Anyone who wants to embark on OER creation must know that it requires commitment. It should also exemplify high quality for educators and students to use it regularly. The accuracy of content is also a must to avoid the spread of false information. Accessibility concerns should also be addressed to ensure that persons-with-disabilities could avail the affordances of OERs. In certain cases, OERs can also entail continual financial support and to avoid such would demand much more creativity from you.

If you are ready, learn more about OERs here: https://www.oercommons.org/

Enjoy creating and harnessing technology for education!