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Contents 1 Searching for and finding OER 1.1 Search engines 1.2 Repositories 1.3 Individual project sites 1.4 Photo, video and other resources 2 Legal issues of using other peoples' content 3 Local hosting of materials 4 Individual bandwidth management strategies 5 Notes 6 References

[edit] Searching for and finding OER

The open education movement has been very successful in publishing large amounts of educational resources. The members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, for example, had published more than 8,000 courses by the end of 2008.^[1] However, this success also creates new challenges. It can be a frustrating experience trying to find good quality, appropriate and clearly licensed resources in the mass of existing material.

Search engines provide one way to navigate the OER waters. A well-formed Google search query will yield a useable list of links, but will require careful assessment of each resource to make sure it fits with your particular set of requirements.

The following section provides links to some OER search or aggregation sites. Given the rapid development in this area, the list will be outdated almost immediately, but it provides an overview of the kinds of resources that exist.^[2]

[edit] Search engines

A number of specialised search engines and services have been set up to make finding educational resources easier. They have different strengths, but do not provide the accuracy and speed that we have become accustomed to in standard web searches. The list is growing constantly.

• DiscoverEd: ccLearn recently launched the beta version of its search engine DiscoverEd. It pulls information for a specified list of sites (rather than indexing the entire internet like google does) and combines it with a "curation" layer, which is designed to add a quality description to the results. The search engine is designed to be extended by open education projects.
• Search Creative Commons: Creative Commons offers a number of specialised search engines (including Google, Yahoo, Flickr, etc.), which only return openly licensed content.
• Commonwealth of Learning Google searches: COL recently replaced its Knowledge Finder search engine with a set of specialised Google searches, including one for OER. COL has created a list of websites they consider to be good sources of Open Educational Resources, to which searches are restricted.
• OpenCourseWare Finder: Developed by Utah State University, the OCW Finder collects a list of courses from some of the well-known open courseware sites, and organises them into categories. It has a quick-loading user interface, but new contents (or new sites) do not show up immediately - the current set of resources favours MIT.
• OER Commons: OER Commons organises materials by subject, type of resource (course, lesson plan, etc.), media type and intended audience, and allows users to rate and comment on the resources. It has an excellent user interface and is one of the few services to specify the licensing details of resources. There is also an OER Google custom search of curated sites.
• Knowledge Hub (OER) Index: Developed by Tecnológico de Monterrey, the Knowledge Hub (OER) Index pilot is a public, multilingual hub that allows the user to discover selected OER, using metadata built by experts and enhanced by librarians. The site features faceted searching and social networking tools help academics, teachers and students.
• XPERT: Xpert is a search engine designed specifically for locating open educational learning resources made freely available for sharing and reuse from a variety of institutions around the world. Learners and educators can use XPERT to search a growing database of open learning resources suitable for students at all levels of study in a wide range of different subjects.

[edit] Repositories

Repositories of training and educational materials offer a range of resources developed by many different organisations and individuals for different subjects, age groups and purposes.

• Connexions: This is Rice University's online repository and collaboration portal for OER. Connexions structures content as modules. The idea is that users can combine these modules in different ways to create individually tailored courses, textbooks, etc. Users can search the repository or browse by subject, language, popularity, title or author. They are also encouraged to develop and store their own resources on the site. As of July 2009, Connexions contained 14,305 modules.
• Curriki: Users can upload educational resources, and provide ratings and comments on resources already on the site. Curriki was launched in 2006 and does not yet offer the volume of resources of the other sites featured here.
• Itrainonline: A set of training materials, most of the resources are licensed as open content. Licenses are often contained in separate files, which have to be downloaded. This makes it more difficult to determine if a resource can be used freely. Itrainonline organises resources in subject areas and offers a site search.
• Global Text Project: The Global Text Project provides free text books for university students in developing countries. Academics and students that use the books are encouraged to edit and improve the texts. All contributions are under editorial control to ensure quality.
• MERLOT: MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) is made available by the California State University Center for Distributed Learning. It is a clearinghouse for teaching and learning resources. Users assess the quality of the resources by posting reviews and comments (like consumers on Amazon). In an informal study, many of the resources were found to be all rights reserved copyright, rather than openly licensed OER. In July 2009 MERLOT listed 21,012 resources, which can be browsed and searched by discipline.
• WikiEducator: This aims to be a central site for the collaborative development of OER, research on the use of OER, and planning of educational projects that involve OER. WikiEducator is a relatively new project and has yet to publish the same volume of content as other repositories. WikiEducator runs on a wiki platform, which allows keyword search. Resources are organised by level of education.

[edit] Individual project sites

A number of institutional OER projects stand out for the amount and quality of resources they publish. One starting point is the list of OpenCourseWare Consortium members with active repositories provided on the OCWC site. The MIT OpenCourseWare project deserves a special mention since it was the first large-scale open courseware endeavour, and has produced 1,900 courses so far. The materials are not designed for online learning, however, and the most important reading materials are often not available. The OpenLearn project at the UK Open University takes a different approach. It publishes resources designed specifically for online independent learning, although only selected modules are offered, rather than full courses.

[edit] Photo, video and other resources

A number of sites with no direct educational focus host collections of user-generated content, which include photos, videos and presentations. Many of these are licensed openly under Creative Commons or similar licenses and can be used as Open Educational Resources.

• Photo: Flickr, and advanced Google and Yahoo! image searches offer the possibility to filter results according to license restrictions. It is even possible to specify detailed CC license options, for example, only searching for pictures that can be modified.
• Video: YouTube allows users to apply Creative Commons licenses to their work, although few have done this to date. This creates uncertainty as to how videos can be used and re-used in education. The Internet Archive has a video section that contains only openly licensed works. A list of other (mostly video) resources can be found on the blog Dave's Imaginary Sound Spaces.
• Presentations: SlideShare is to slide presentations what YouTube is to videos. Users can apply a Creative Commons license to their presentations, although there is no way to search for CC-licensed content. Users can browse by popularity, category (including an education category) or tag.

[edit] Legal issues of using other peoples' content

See sub-section on license incompatibility in the section on copyright and open licenses.

[edit] Local hosting of materials

Users - especially users in developing countries - may prefer to create local repositories, rather than accessing OER online. In essence this means copying the resources onto a computer in the local network, so that users do not need an Internet connection in order to access them.

In some parts of the world the obvious reason for creating local repositories is the scarcity and cost of bandwidth. For example, in 2004 "Denmark – a country roughly the size of Costa Rica - ha[d] more than twice the international Internet bandwidth than the whole of Latin America[n] and the Caribbean combined" (International Telecommunication Union, 2004). A recent visitor to Tanzania noted that the whole country shared roughly the same bandwidth that he had for his computer at home in the USA.^[3] Local hosting saves money and greatly increases the speed at which users can access resources.

Finally, having a local copy of resources can facilitate new ways of collaboration and adaptation. For example, exporting a course from MIT into a local wiki (a website that can be edited by its users) would permit the creation of assignments that required students to adapt and update the course materials.

There are a number of ways in which copies of materials can be provided:

• Website mirror: A mirror is an (exact) copy of a website. Some popular websites are hosted on mirrors across the world as this reduces access time for users from different regions. Static mirrors are one-time snapshots of existing websites. Dynamic mirrors are usually "seeded" with a substantial amount of content copied from the original server and are then updated based on user requests. For example, if a user in the local network were to request a web page that had not been copied onto the local mirror, it would have to be downloaded from the international site. At the same time, it would be added to the local mirror, so that the next user accessing the same page would get the (newly available) local copy, saving additional downloads from the international server.
• Web proxy/cache: A proxy server acts as a "middleman" between a user and a resource. A proxy server can be used to stop access to unwanted resources (by blocking users on a university campus from accessing music download sites for example). It can also be used to direct users to local copies of web resources. This can be done in a way that is invisible to the user, who will not be aware of whether he or she is accessing the original resource or a local copy. The user types in the URL for the website he or she is interested in, and the proxy server decides if the content can be sent from the local copy or whether it has to be first downloaded from the international server.
• Copying content: A labour intensive process of copying resources from websites into a local repository. This is the least attractive option for users interested only in accessing resources since it requires a great deal of customisation to ensure that hyperlinks continue to work. It is also unlikely to reproduce a user experience similar to accessing the original material. However, if users are to adapt resources, some copying into a local system is required. The process can be made easier by using some existing standards, described above. For example, courses from MIT OpenCourseWare can be exported as IMS Content Packaging archives, which can then be imported into a local learning management system for adaptation and re-use. A number of tools allow automatic downloading of web content for local hosting and can also make the process significantly faster (see, for example, wget).
• Mirror sites run by others: Finally, there is a possibility that the desired resources already exist on mirror sites on a network in the user's country or region. This usually improves access speeds and, depending on the way the Internet Service Provider charges for access, reduces cost. For example, in South Africa, the Tertiary Education Network (TENET) hosts a mirror of MIT's OpenCourseWare repository. Access speeds from university networks in South Africa are a good deal faster to this local mirror than to the original MIT site.

[edit] Individual bandwidth management strategies

Many institutions in developing countries have poor bandwidth, preventing users from accessing OER as easily as they would like. Institutional strategies for bandwidth management and optimisation are described in the open book, How to accelerate your internet. When implemented at the institutional level these strategies can vastly improve internet connectivity.

Individuals can obtain large OER by using a tool that can resume downloads. Suppose a user wants to access a 21 MB zip file from MIT OCW. Over a typical developing country connection - estimated at 20kb/s (Aptivate, n.d.) - this might take up to three hours to download. A user with access to his or her own computer can use a browser that is able to pause and resume downloads, such as Firefox. This means that he or she can restart downloads that have failed at some point.

If the user is on an institutional computer and is, for example, gradually downloading content onto a memory stick, he or she can use a tool like wget (under Ubuntu/Linux). It is also possible to use wget to run a bandwidth-limited download over night or at weekends, when the network is less busy.^[4]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

Aptivate. n.d. Web Design Guidelines for Low Bandwidth. http://www.aptivate.org/webguidelines/Home.html

International Telecommunication Union. 2004. ICT Statistics. http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/ict/index.html