OER: from left field to mainstream

I really enjoyed catching up with Derek Wenmoth over the weekend to work with some schools in Wellington, and while we sparked off each other in a number of areas, one of the threads we kept coming back to in our discussions was the potential of OERs: Open Education Resources. We use OERs a lot, mostly through Wikieducator, but we're always looking for ways to grow the community and expand the work we are doing. We have a Creative Commons policy at our school which means that every policy and teaching and learning resource our teachers produce is made available under a CC licence by default. Our staff and students build collaborative teaching and learning tutorials and resources online which can be used reciprocally by other students, classes and schools all over the world. When Derek blogged recently about OERs, he neatly captured some of the things I've been mulling over for a while:

"This is indeed the challenge – how we move from the peripheral interest in OERs, driven mostly by individual practitioners at the edges of their 'day jobs', to where there is wider acceptance and adoption of OERs as a core part of an institutional approach to the organisation and management of resources to support learning"

Wikitasters for Wikieducator

I had the pleasure of running a Wikitaster session for Red Beach School this week: an introduction to Wikieducator. It covers the basics of what Wikieducator is and why it's useful to educators:
"The WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative:

• planning of education projects linked with the development of free content;
• development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning;
• work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs.
• networking on funding proposals developed as free content." (Link)
  

Perhaps the most transformative aspect of Wikieducator for both teachers and students is the fact that they are open and free: free for you to take, remix, reuse, transform and adapt. Everything in Wikieducator is released into the public domain through a creative commons licence, so we are no longer beholden to text book producers to package up our curriculum and sell it back to us. In my history class last year, the students wrote the textbook as the course progressed. Not only was it more co-constructed than a black and white textbook, it also had images, audio and video. Here are a couple of examples of what they achieved last year:

• Black Civil rights in the U.S.A.
• The Origins of World War II

As with any collaborative, wiki-based project, these will continue to improve year by year and as more schools contribute to them.
And that's perhaps the best thing about Wikieducator: the collaborative opportunities that arise out of contributing to a global project. The sky's the limit.