http://stemoer.pbworks.com/

The UK-based JISC OER initiative is funding and creating many great open educational resources and guides for users and creators of OERs. This particular guide is aimed at creators of OERs from the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics domains, though contains advice that is likely useful to all sorts of OER authors.

Tags: engineering, handbook, mathematics, science, technology.

http://www.wikipremed.com/

Passed on to us by its creator, John Wetzel, the WikiPremed MCAT course is a “donationware” site (open access but does ask for a donation if you find yourself replying on it heavily) to help students prepare for the MCAT test.

Tags: medical, premed.

http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/oer-uct/2010/03/26/finding-openly-licensed-images-for-teaching-and-learning-materials

Helpful post by Michael Paskevicius that lists a number of specialized image search engines that will help you find free and openly licensed images for use in your teachind and learning

Tags: Images.

<a href=”http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/20559/”>http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/20559/</a>.

In a wonderful demonstration of ‘walking the talk,’ Dr. Charles Severance of the University of Michigan remixed an existing open textbook, <a href=”http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html”>Think Python: How to Think like a Computer Scientist</a>, in only 11 days to produce a new textbook for his class, ones students could print out for $10 using a local print-on-demand kiosk on campus.

Tags: computer science, python, remix, reuse.

http://code.google.com/edu/

Google has released code and curriculum in partnership with a number of US universities in the hopes of bringing contemporary coding practices into more university computer science curriculum. The materials are available for free under a Creative Commons license.

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http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1008

If you are thinking about trying to get “openness” started at your institution, the students in David Wiley’s grad course, “IPT 692R: Open Education Policy Seminar” have done you a HUGE favour by compiling these Open Access and OER Policy Reviews. They have surveyed many of the leading institutions and identified salient aspects of their policies for others to learn from or emulate, a huge time saver when considering the policy complexities that can be involved with starting a formal project on campus.

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http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=UNESCO_OER_Toolkit

Those interested in starting an OER project on their own campus may be interested in the new OER Toolkit developed on behalf of UNESCO to be a startup guide for participating in the international open education commons. Lots of good tips and information for the OER change agent here.

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http://blog.oer.sbctc.edu/2009/10/state-initiatives-regarding-electronic.html.

Cable Green, eLearning Director for Washington State’s Community College System, points to this useful summary of current Open Textbook initiatives in the US, a movement that is steadily gaining traction as textbooks increase in price and cost becomes an even bigger challenge to prospective students.

(see also Cable’s link to a recent survey on “Faculty Attitudes to Affordable and Open Textbooks.”)

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http://edtechdev.blogspot.com/2009/10/free-science-technology-engineering-and.html.

Doug Holton, an instructor in the Instructional Tech and Learning department at Utah State Uinversity, has compiled a useful post pointing to freely available books concerning Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Education. These aren’t *textbooks* but instead free resources pointing to the future of education in these areas.

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http://www.k12opened.com/blog/archives/162

Via the blog comes this fantastic story:

What a great idea! DeAnza College has a community service learning project that involves developing open educational resources. They suggest several projects that students can contribute to…

I really like that the projects they’ve selected are all ones that can easily be contributed to by an average person. More courses should do something like this (like the open dictionary). I think it’s an incredibly valuable way to get immersed quickly in OER (and more immediately valuable than designing yet another new OER project — there are plenty already out there that need our help!)

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http://www.openculture.com/2009/07/the_open_culture_iphone_app.html

The Open Culture blog (home of all things ‘Open’) has released a FREE iPhone app that allows you to “listen to audiobooks, university courses, language lessons, and other intelligent content on the iPhone.” The dream of mobile open learning moves ever closer!

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http://www.openculture.com/2009/04/how_do_you_use_open_courses.html

The excellent Open Culture blog asks the question “How Do You Use Open Courses?” If you’ve ever benefitted from an OER, either as an instructor or a learner, why not contribute your story. Stories of how Open Educational Resources have been used by peers like yourself are one of the best ways to help newcomers understand the value of these efforts. Give a little back by sharing your story.

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http://www.youtube.com/edu

Many people are already aware that there are scads of useful videos in Youtube for teaching and learning. Youtube has created this uber channel called Youtube EDU which aggregates all of the official US post-secondary channels from their official ‘partners.’ While not necessarily “open” these are all free to use and embed in your courses.

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Open search Resources

Much as we’d love to think people could use freelearning.ca to find everything they need, the truth is there are many other very high quality search tools to find open resources, often discipline-specific. Dean Giustini from UBC

http://oerconsortium.org/campus-kit/

We’ve posted before about the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources project to develop and share Open Textbooks for community colleges. But it still seemed worthwhile to highlight this new resource within their site, a “set of materials suitable for use in promoting use of OER on a community college campus” available to anyone. There are some really good resources here if you are a champion of Openness on your campus looking for source materials to help your cause.

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http://snurl.com/dgd3y

The OER Commons sites has a large curated list of Open Textbooks specifically for higher education. Do your students a favour and have a look to see if there’s an open textbook that might work for your course.

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http://www.slideshare.net/thecleversheep/creative-commons-what-every-educator-needs-to-know-presentation

If you are an educator new to the idea of Creative Commons you may like to check out this presentation as it presents a useful introduction to the ideas and uses of Creative Commons in education.

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http://medpedia.com/

Medpedia, a new online medical encyclopedia relying on user-generated content from anyone with an M.D. or a Ph.D. in a biomedical field, officially became available today. All content is available under the GFDL open license.

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http://smarthistory.org/

While we typically don’t post news items on individual open educational resources (there are so many, when would we ever find the time) this one seemed noteworthy as the issue of using copyrighted images in open content has come up a few times in past discussions. This resource, a “multimedia web-book” offers a nice introduction to Art History, including many source images, for free reuse under a Creative Common Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

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