Finding reusable teaching material

Reusable teaching material can support teaching practitioners in many ways including:

• Time– The most common reason cited for not developing resources is the lack of time and why recreate something if it is already out there?
• Adaptability– if you use Open ducational Resources (OERs) they allow you to take a resource to reuse or remix it for a specific teaching and learning context. For example, you find an interesting OER created in the United States but some of the terms are different so it can be adapted and in turn that can then be redistributed for others to use in the UK.
• Development-It can generate innovation in teaching practice as well as open opportunities for collaboration and sharing.

*The term Open Educational Resources (OERs) was first introduced at a conference hosted by UNESCO in 2000:

“ OER are learning, teaching, and research materials in any format or medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others” UNESCO 2019

Copyright

Copyright is the basis on which open licensing is built. Therefore, we need to have a clear understanding of how copyright works in order to use resources and creative commons licences that are attached to them.

The infogram scales from the most open creative commons licence at the top of the image down to the most restrictive.

According to an Educause report from 2018, the main educational technology organisation in the US, a mid-term key trend in accelerating HE technology adoption is the proliferation of OERs. With the current pandemic that prediction will probably prove to be even more true than in pre-Covid times.

How do I use OERS?

There are many OERS out there but on this site, you will find some of the most common and trustworthy sources. We hope to progressively build up recommended resources over the next few months.

Do get in touch if you have some OERs that you can recommend, particularly if they are discipline specific.