Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Open educational resources have gone global and may help make learning more accessible, equitable and inclusive around the world.

So says the new Educause Horizon report, which identifies technologies and trends that are changing higher education.

This year’s forecast was created by nearly five dozen higher education experts, a third of them from institutions outside of the U.S. OER was one of six “emerging technologies and practices” the panelists highlighted as most likely to significantly influence postsecondary teaching and learning in the future.

As schools and districts try to reduce textbook costs and digitize instructional resources, one of the struggles many teachers have is finding good repositories of open education resources (OER). The first step is to know how to access OER resources. However, access itself isn’t enough and the sheer volume of materials can be overwhelming. The second challenge is knowing how to curate or organize the materials you find into useful groups. The term curate comes from the museum world where for eons, curators gathered artifacts and arranged them to tell a compelling story or to otherwise educate.

Shrinking school budgets and growing interest in open content has created an increased demand for open educational resources. According to the FCC, "The U.S. spends more than $7 billion per year on K-12 textbooks, but too many students are still using books that are 7-10 years old, with outdated material." There is an alternative: openly licensed courseware. But where do you find this content and how can you share your own teaching and learning materials? This month I've rounded up a list of seven open educational resources for K-12 and higher education:

Open educational resources (OER) are digitized materials that are available for use and re-use in teaching, learning, and research, very often under a Creative

You might find creating OERs to be much easier than you first anticipated. Or, you might already have materials you can share with the “right” licenses. From simply digitized materials to carefully staged video lectures, OERs can add a whole new dimension to your teaching. It can improve your teaching method, and it can also improve student performances. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can create OERs.

If your students want to find free images for whatever awesome projects they’re working on, there are plenty of choices. That said, we’ve taken at least some of the guesswork out of that search with this post. Today we’re sharing 15 of the open source image resources that caught our eye recently.

The idea that knowledge is power is not a new concept, however the idea that knowledge, resources, and information should be widely available and also free might be a slightly newer concept. Before the advancement of the internet and today’s technology, the idea of access to free information, teaching resources, and even online books was unheard of. If you wanted to learn about a topic, you could pay for the materials and or books to learn about your topic of interest. If you want to teach about a specific area, you needed to develop the materials yourself or pay for them. Many educators now believe that teaching materials and other information should be free. As we begin to share our resources as copyright free materials, we also open the idea globally that teaching, learning, and research materials should be accessible to everyone.  Edutopia notes that open educational resources can also save teachers significant time, planning, energy, and resources.

teaching information literacy