Sharing OER taps into the concept of redistribution — the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend) — one of the five Rs of OER discussed in the course Understanding OER course.
Sharing is one aspect of the OER revolution, but there are those who are either not familiar with OER or remain skeptical about their benefits. So, how does one promote OER to grow awareness of their usefulness as learning and instructional tools?
Repositories
Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash
You may already be sharing OER by posting videos up on YouTube and/or sharing Creative Commons licensed material that you have created and posted up on the open Web.
In the Creating, Licensing, and Publishing OER course, we explored several common repositories where you can share OER, including:
MERLOT: Contribute Material
MERLOT is one of the biggest and first OER repositories. You can submit published OER content here to be findable by anyone searching MERLOT.
OER Commons: Submit OER
OER Commons is a popular repository for OER. Submit published OER here to be findable by anyone searching OER Commons.
Open Textbook Library: Submit a Book
The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly licensed textbooks.
These repositories are designed to make it easy for others to search and find your OER content. The search features of these repositories rely on well-described content, and meaningful tags.
Institution-Specific Repositories
Your home institution’s library may host a repository, such as the Academic Commons at Stony Brook University, that allows you to add your content and apply an open license so that anyone can search for, access, and use your materials.
Your campus’s reference librarians will be able to advise you on the availability of a locally-hosted repository, or other appropriate locations where you might share your work publicly.
Discipline-Specific Repositories
As more OER become available, new repositories are launching that focus on specific disciplines. You should explore and consider sharing through these repositories if you are interested in sharing with a discipline specific audience. Examples:
Engage CS (Computer Science)
Faculty-contributed, peer-reviewed introductory computer course materials and instructor engagement practice guidelines.
AMSER (Applied Math & Science)
A portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in community and technical colleges but free for anyone to use
Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL)
COERLL is one of 16 National Foreign Language Resource Centers (LRC’s) funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The overall mission of these federally-funded centers is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings.
Project CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments)
An open access resource for faculty and librarians. It is intended to be a collaborative space for adapting and experimenting with research assignments and sharing the success or lessons learned so that others may benefit. The database contains multiple, reliable and reproducible research assignments.
CK-12 (K-12 STEM)
CK-12 provides standards-aligned teaching resources. Content is mapped to a variety of levels and standards, including common core.
MLA Commons (Modern Language Association)
A search, discovery, and hosting tool for society members. Allows users to mix and match existing material, browse Open Access scholarship, and upload their own work to the CORE Repository.
Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.