OEC: Open Educational Courses

Open Educational Courses (OEC) are one type of Open Educational Resource (OER). OER’s, according to UNESCO, are “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”

Read more on Open Education Resources (which go beyond courses)

Open Courses provide global and legal access to education, which is a United Nations basic human right (Article 26). For a teacher, OECs provide access to those who wish to further their own Professional Development or who want resources that they can then legally modify and adapt to then use in their own classrooms.

OECs are also important for developing countries and rural communities, where many students may not be able to afford textbooks, where access to classrooms may be limited, and where teacher-training programs may be lacking. UBC has developed MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) which are available to anyone with internet access so that individuals are able to learn about salient topics like:

• Reconciliation Through Indigenous Education
• Teaching Mental Health Literacy for the Classroom

Decide what you want to pursue based on either your own interests or by looking through some available online courses. You may choose to focus on courses or materials to use in your classroom but you might also want to explore a topic for your personal growth.

Here are some popular OECs that may benefit your teaching pedagogical practice:

• Open Learning at Harvard
  • You can also browse the Harvard Online Learning Catalogue. Click on Find Courses and then Filter the results by cost, just select free
• MIT: OpenCourseWare 
  • OCW Educator Portal: Filter by your curriculum area for assignments, lectures, exams, and notes that you are allowed to use, adapt, and modify. 
  • MIT K12 Videos: Webseries, Digital Workshops, and Videos you can use with students to promote STEM.
    • A supplemental course for example: Becoming the Next Bill Nye
  • Highlights for Highschool: Browse for teacher and student resources by subject area including teaching materials

Blink Tower (2012) OER (Open Educational Resources) Introduction

More Available OERs – beyond open courses

• Creative Commons Search

  Search for a variety of media including images, music, and film.

• HippoCampus

  A free academic web site that delivers rich multimedia content–videos, animations, and simulations–on general education subjects from middle-school to college level.

• MERLOT

  MERLOT is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community.

• NSDL (National Science Digital Library)

  Digital resources and collections supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.

• OER Commons

  A portal for teaching and learning materials around the world.

• Open Course Library

  A collection of high quality, free-to-use college-level courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs.

• Open Oregon Educational Resources

  A list of materials created by community college instructors in Oregon, USA.

• Open Professionals Education Network: Find OER

  Find openly licensed media elements to use within your courses.

• OpenStax

  View and share free educational material in small modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports or other academic assignments.

• The Orange Grove

  OER repository for the state of Florida. Contains open courseware, open textbooks, 3d object models, learning modules, and videos.

• Wisc-Online

  Small, high quality digital library of Web-based learning resources.

• Saylor Academy Open Textbooks

  Over 100 free textbooks that are curated from free and open online resources by expert educators.

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