7 OER Sites Every Faculty Member Should Visit

In preparation for conferences and training sessions, I wanted to develop a list of my top 10 OER sites for faculty members to visit.  As it turns out, I don't have that many.  So, here's my top 7 OER sites that every faculty member should visit (in no specific order).

Open Professionals Education Network (OPEN)

In support of Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded OPEN and encourages grantees to reuse existing OER to save time and effort.  OPEN provides specific sources for grantee use for photo/images, video, audio/music, general education searches, such as repositories, open textbooks and complete courses, including the ones listed below. Select the “Find OER” tab at the top of the page for a list of OER.

College Open Textbooks

College Open Textbooks is dedicated to increasing awareness and adopting OER for community colleges and two-year colleges.  The College Open Textbooks Collaborative consists of twenty-non for-profit and non-profit organizations with over 200 colleges.  Furthermore, the organization provides training opportunities for instructors and peer reviews textbooks.  These efforts are focused on decreasing textbook costs by offering high-quality open source textbooks.

MERLOT II

MERLOT is a program of the California State University.  It contains thousands of learning materials, including textbooks, animations, assessment tools, presentations and much, much more!

MIT OpenCourseWare

In 1999, MIT Faculty developed and launched OpenCourseWare (OCW).  The pilot version ran in 2002 with 50 courses published.  A decade later, 2150 courses have been published with numerous translations available including Spanish and Portuguese.  Additionally, as of September 2013, MIT reported that OCW has tracked over 49 million YouTube views, 43 million iTunesU downloads and over 182 million visits to their website (MITOCW dashboard report). 

OER Commons

This site provides access to OER, as well as tools to organize, create and save.  Allows free registration and advanced search features including Education Level, Material Type and Media Format to name a few.

Open Course Library

The Open Course Library (OCL) was launched in 2011 by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges in order to combat the effect of textbook costs on student success and completion.  OCL created new course material using Creative Commons licenses for 81 of its highest-enrolled courses.

Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization that hosts numerous projects including Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and Wiktionary, all of which are available under a Creative Commons License.  Commons has over 19 million media files including images, sound and videos that can be used at no charge. 

Please feel free to share any of your go-to resources.

So Many Apps! So Little Time!

With iPads and Apple TV sweeping the campus, many faculty are trying to just keep up with what's happening in the app world.  If you turn to your colleagues and ask them what are their favorite apps, each one will likely provide you with a list of their top picks.  So the question becomes, how do I really know what's out there and available?

While the ProfHacker in The Chronicle of Higher Education will periodically publish a piece on iPad apps, eliciting recommendations from its readers, there are also a few web sites that I have found particularly helpful when exploring the wonderful world of iPad Apps.

One can always turn to the Apple iTunes Preview Apps Store or iTunes for Education through your favorite browser for lists of popular educational apps.  Not to be outdone, Google Play also has its site which can be browsed for apps for android devices. Excellent descriptions of each app is available with a simple mouse click. 

PadGadget (http://www.padgadget.com/ ) is the self-proclaimed “…premier iPad focused website for iPad news, apps and accessory reviews.”  While the site is not specifically focused on educational technology, those of you who want to know what's happening in the wonderful world of the iPad will find this web site appealing.  It is a great site for to help you keep up with what is happening in the iPad world and the latest apps and gadgets that you can use to extend your iPad's functionality.  In addition, the Apps Tracker tab allows one to filter the top 200 apps by category and cost.  The results can be sorted by number of downloads, rating, trends, etc. Clicking on any app in the list will pop up a more detailed app description. You can also follow PadGadget on Twitter.

Another excellent site, EducationalTechnology and Mobile Learning, provides several pages with links to iPad resources, Ed Tech Resources, and a number of other tools for educators.

Happy exploring!