Open educational resources available
Open Education Week, a week set aside to help spread awareness of numerous free online resources available to students and teachers, this year falls during dead week, March 11-15.
Joan Campbell, M. Ed. eLearning Specialist at UCC looks forward to this year’s event. Campbell said, “Open Education Week is an international event highlighting Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are ‘the buzz’ in education right now because they break down traditional barriers to education of all kinds. It will be fascinating to see what happens with OER over the next few years.”
Open educational resources help students with homework or studying and can present concepts better sometimes than traditional textbooks. Online resources include textbooks, study groups, video lectures, assessment tools, course materials and research.
Open educational resources are free so anyone can use them who desires to learn. Falling on dead week, Open Education Week presents students with online resources that can be fully utilized to help study and improve their understanding on concepts and various topics before finals.
Some of the most popular sites:
Kahn Academy provides over 4,000 online tutorials on essentially any subject, not just math. It includes exercises to help master content.
YouTube EDU has an endless amount of videos that help students better understand concepts and work through problems.
Project Gutenberg offers over 42,000 free ebooks available to download or read directly online.
Crash Course provides online video “classes” that cover subjects including biology, chemistry, literature and history.
SciShow provides short online videos on tons of popular science topics.
MIT OpenCourseWare has been releasing versions of virtually all MIT course content under an open license since 2004.
Ck-12 Foundation focuses on providing textbooks for U.S. K-12 schools. They work with states and institutions to build web-based, collaborative textbooks that are free to use and adapt.