Certified OER Practitioner

Together with Rolf Reinhardt and Andreas Link and an international committee I have developed the Certified OER Practitioners course, OER - Services which we are now piloting. The version is currently revised and later published on the wikieducator. One task is to blog about it, so here it comes:

 

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution. UNESCO believes that universal access to high quality education is key to the building of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue. Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building.The OER movement started in 2002 with MIT and UNESCO, aiming to provide edcuation for free around the world.

OER Services.... provide a holistic and participatory service network for all OER stakeholders worldwide. "With OER Services, the creation, use, re-use and facilitation of collaborative education becomes professional. Free access to online learning material and increasing quality of educational resources through peer-creation and transparency: These are the promises which boosted the topic "OER" upfront. However, many questions are remaining still unclear - even years after the first OER initiatives have started. At the moment, there are no business models created which have proven their success in non-funded environments. This is where we are starting: With us thriving on collaborative education becomes professional." Andreas Link, Director of OER Service.

One prerequisite for OER  is Creative Commons licencing. On the creative commons wiki which is available in almost all languages further information can be followed up as well as the YouTube clip below.

 

What we're learning from online education:

Daphne Koller is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free -- not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. Each keystroke, comprehension quiz, peer-to-peer forum discussion and self-graded assignment builds an unprecedented pool of data on how knowledge is processed and, most importantly, absorbed. Daphne Koller is bringing courses from top colleges online, free for anyone who wants to take them. Until now some 640 000 students are taking part of worldwide professional education with NO costs.

We should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity … by actually talking with them.” (Daphne Koller)

There is also already the OER University, The OER university is a virtual collaboration of like-minded institutions committed to creating flexible pathways for OER learners to gain formal academic credit. There is also the Kahn Academy just to mention some of teh large actors in the OER global arena.

 Where do you like to head...

What are your goals, desires and learning goals/dreams Take the chance and get the best learning possibiliteis globally, with OER....

Education Without Limits!