Making Free & Open Education a Reality

Open Educational Resourses (OERs) are digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research.

Open World Learning Institute

The Open World Learning Institute (OWL) helps individuals, families, and communities find, create and use open educational resources. OWL collects, organizes, creates and distributes OERs to make it easy for anyone to use them effectively and meaningfully. OWL does this by resolving the key issues of time, skills and access.




OWL:

• Supports the community in the use and development of open education;
• Establishes self-sustaining, community-based open education centers;
• Provides digital literacy programming and community outreach;
• Researches best practices in open education;
• Performs scientifically-based research of learning technologies, products and services;
• Develops open source educational tools;
• Produces standards-compliant open education courses;
• Conducts research and advocacy in the area of digital and educational law and regulation.

Codswallop

Here's a useful snippet: Chris Garrett and Yoav Ezer posted an article "50+ Open Source/Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat & PDF" on their blog "Codswallop".

UNESCO Free & Open Source Software Portal

It really is good to see so many international NGOs and intergovermental organisations creating open educational resources and/or promoting open access. UNESCO has created a gateway to resources related to Free Software and Open Source Technology movement.




The UNESCO Free Software Portal gives access to documents and websites which are references for the Free Software/Open Source Technology movement. It is also a gateway to resources related to Free Software. With the Free Software Portal, UNESCO provides a single interactive access point to pertinent information for users who wish to acquire an understanding of the Free Software movement, to learn why it is important and to apply the concept. Visitors to the UNESCO Free Software Portal can browse through pre-established categories or search for specific words. They can add a new link or modify an already existing link.

The world as a village

The Village - suppose the world was a village of just one hundred people - what would it look like? This video gives us a sobering way to look at the world's statistics about the distribution of wealth.




It is an old video (2006) but I think it deserves playing again.

More Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student, or self-learner. OER Commons is an open learning social network portal where teachers and professors (from pre-K to graduate school) can access their colleagues’ course materials, share their own, and collaborate on affecting today’s classrooms.



The OERs uploaded to this site may be either Course-Related Materials or Libraries and Collections items. Course-Related Materials include both Full Courses and Learning Modules. Components include syllabi, lectures, lesson plans, homework assignments, quizzes, lab activities, pedagogical materials, games, and simulations. Libraries and Collections items are resources from digital media collections or libraries of digitized primary sources.

Click here to go to the teaching materials.