Open educational resources (OERs) are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.
This term Open Educational Resources was first coined at a UNESCO conference in 2000 and then promoted to give free access to educational resources on world level.
Today, a lot of institutions provide open educational resources and make it free for all learners via online platforms. Here we are compiling list of some of the best open educational resources to engage students.
Khan Academy: Khan Academy is one of the best examples of open educational resources available over the Internet. Khan Academy provides tutorial videos mainly in Maths, Science and many other subjects. These three thousand plus videos help students to learn on their own pace.
iTunesU: The iTunesU app enables users to compile notes, course lectures, books, and many other supporting educational materials for an whole or combination of course.
P2PU: P2PU stands for Peer 2 Peer University- is a popular open education project. Anyone can participate in the project which is facilitated by volunteers. It leverages open social web and open content for learning.
Share My Lesson: This is an extremely detailed collection of lesson plans from a lot of sources. All the lessons available here are free. Check out the site and find your favorite lesson.
Teaching Channel: The Teaching Channel offers amazing videos. There are around 70 videos available for K-5 for both English and Math lessons. You will find some best videos that are helpful in answer questions about applying the new standards.
OpenStudy: OpenStudy is a place where students and independent learners meet together. With this platform, learners can see others also working on the same area to give support to each other as well as reply each other’s’ queries.
OpenClass: OpenClass is an amazing learning environment that’s open, easy, and completely free.
Connextions: Connextions is a source of open educational content that has more than 17,000 openly licensed learning elements.
HippoCampus: HippoCampus.org is a free, core academic web site that delivers rich multimedia content- videos, animations, simulations and other credible information on a wide range of general education subjects to middle-school and high school teachers, college professors, and students, free of charge.
LearnZillion: LearnZillion’s database has many best Common Core-aligned Mathematics modules for grades 2-6. It is among the rapidly growing website that offers open educational resource.
OCWSearch: OCW Search stands for OpenCourseWare. It is a search engine dedicated to help learners to find free content.
CK-12: The CK-12 platform offers free digital textbooks for K-12. The content of the platform is standards based.
Curriki: Curriki is a non-profit organization that provides students, teachers and parents with free-access to quality education content. This unique web 2.0 platform allows educators to find and publish lessons, text books and course and connect to other educators worldwide.
Smarthistory: Smarthistory is an open multimedia platform which is free. It reveals how heavy, expensive and old-fashioned art history books are.
iUniv: It is a Japanese startup which is constructing mobile and web apps. It also produces social video as well as audio. You share iUniv resource on various social networking website like Twitter, Facebook, where students can vigorously occupy in discussions.
Which one would you add to this list? Let us know in the comment box.