OERs - Open Educational Resources

The Open Educational Resources (OERs) apply to free-of-charge teaching, learning and study resources in digital media, since they are distributed with an unrestricted license (Creative Commons) that encourages us to access, modify and redistribute them without any limitations or requirements. The OER concept is considered of considerable significance and relevance in the future of teaching and schooling, particularly in school and university settings.

The OERs provide a useful tool for students and teachers to gather information without needing to repay a dollar as they can be used in interactive contexts, they can be implemented in various methodologies/approaches and they can be tailored to facilitate student-centered learning.

These OERs provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5 R's activities that are summarized here:

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that protects ideas and their authorship. The basic idea of Creative Commons licenses is simple and helpful. The following infographic shows very clearly how Creative Commons works.

We can find several OERs websites:

- Curriki (curriki.org) 
Through multiple sponsorships, it provides more than 50,000 services for the school community (K-12) and has more than 430,000 registered customers, more than ten million visitors and almost 1000 working teams.

- Connexions (CNX)
It was founded by Rice University, Houston (TX), with the involvement of organizations from more than 20 countries. Most of the content is for university students, but this aspect enables teachers to be associated with work and the university climate. Currently, it sells more than 20,000 kits and provides free space to build and distribute your own content. It is part of OpenDOAR an open access registry directory with a catalog of more than 800 software repositories.

- Commons OER.
It is one of the oldest archives, founded by the Institute for the Study of Information Management in Education in 2007. Currently, it has more than 150,000 services in many languages.

- CK-12.
It has classrooms, seminars, tests, and a fantastic learning environment. The CK-12 group, founded in 2007, produces free downloadable textbooks for the different U.S. educational grades and subjects.

- Wikieducator.
In Wikieducator there are tutorials about how to find, create, edit, use and exchange free educational tools in the classroom.

Here you have one example of my OERs with one Kahoot! activity to learn Spanish in Dual-Language Prek:
Challenge activity link: https://kahoot.it/challenge/09964053?challenge-id=88d3b312-01c1-46cd-bce5-963725e67679_1587336833797
Challenge PIN: 09964053
The activity is about ABC vocabulary about the Fall in Spanish.

Reflection on the use of OERs

1. What guided your decision in selecting the open educational resource (OER) for your artifact?                                               
As I am more visual I am using freepik.com, it is one of my favorites. As I am creating materials and resources on Teacherspayteachers and other platforms for educators, I use lots of pictures, indeed I got a premium account. For lessons I really like curriki.org. I am really grateful for this! 

2. How would this OER benefit both you and your students?                                                                                                           
With the images from freepik.com I created an activity on Kahoot! (connections to the former module - educational apps) to learn ABC vocabulary in Spanish. You can find the link to the challenge activity above.

3. What challenges did you encounter in developing or designing this artifact?                                                                         
The biggest challenge is time. Designing and creating your materials and resources using royalty-free images is time-consuming. You need to find the proper image for your PreK students, it has to be simple and child-style, but without losing its appearance and meaning.
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4. What hurdles do you foresee in utilizing OER in your course?                                                                                                 
Many times the images have other complements like decorations that are unnecessary. To delete the extra or complementary images around the one you like you need to use a specific program. Therefore, you need to download the image, edit it and save it. It often works. However, when you try to use that image on the new document the image lost quality or was modified, it presents other unexpected characteristics that stop your creativity and increase your frustration...  Anyway, I really enjoy designing and creating new activities for my students.