Finding Open Educational Materials
We are not supposed to assume that any source Google delivers as a (default) search result allows you t0 re-use it. Copyrights may provide an obstacle: although the copyright protects the creator of content from others stealing or copying them illegally, it also prevents others from re-using them for educational purposes.
Then again, for more then a decade, universities worldwide have been sharing Open Educational Resources: educational resources anybody is allowed to re-use, remix, repurpose and redistribute freely as they please. This is because these educational materials have been published under a Creative Commons License, as legal exemptions on the copyright.
The more educational resources become available, the harder it can be to find the exact resources you’re looking for and allow you to re-use them. So a nice list of (good!) search engines for Open Educational Resources seems in order. I’m sure others have already found many more (like Willem van Valkenburg and SURF (trend report, both pdf: 2012, p. 39; 2013, p. 103), but here’s a shortlist I know is interesting.
- OCW Search: find over 2000 courses from 10 universities
- OERCommons
- OCW Finder
- OER Dynamic Search
- Google OCW
- Wikiwijs (Mainly Dutch content and mainly secondary education level)
- Kahn Academy
- search.creativecommons.org: focussed on multimedia
Please don’t hesitate to bring in more (and better) if you know them, by commenting on this blog. But if you do, please add why you think your suggestions are great ones 😉
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