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.

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.

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.

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!)

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!

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.

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.

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

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.