Open Educational Resources
There does not seem to be a definitive description of what an OER is, but this broad definition of what they are (from OER Commons) gives an overview:
‘Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world.’
Basically the concept of EOR’s is the open sharing of teaching practices and flexible learning and they can be identified by the fact that they are free educational resources that are distributed globally. The positives are that it is great that they are free, they are easy to access and promote the use of digital media and they also promote sharing, but the challenges are focused on time and the willingness of practitioners to use the OER’s.
I have been looking at a range of resources available in my subject area of animation and games and I searched on Educause, Open of Course , Creative Commons and OER Commons.
I found a character animation resource on OER Commons: https://www.oercommons.org/courses/character-animation which could be very useful for my subject specialism. I searched on the Open of Course site and there were quite limited resources on there, so I think it may be quite a new OER. There were only two resources for digital photography: http://www.open-of-course.org/courses/course/index.php?categoryid=67 which may be of use when we use cameras for stop motion animation. I found a resource on Educause related to storytelling which is something I teach within my specialism: http://er.educause.edu/articles/2008/10/web-20-storytelling-emergence-of-a-new-genre. There was not a huge amount of content specifically aimed at my specialism which makes me think that it may be a good idea to actually contribute and share some resources on this site in order to share my own practice with others.
Pros and cons of using OER’s
OER’s are useful because they can improve knowledge, access to copyright free media, improve technical skills, improve the range of digital resources, they are free, they encourage sharing of practice and depending on the license used - some resources can be modified to fit specific topics.
There may be some restrictions to the use of OER’s as they may have a license that states whether you can adapt them or if they wish them to be kept intact. It may be a restriction if you find a great resource that with some tweaking could be perfect, but the author restricts its usage.