OER and the open movement have recently evolved, in the year 1999, both the University of Tübingen (Germany) and The Open University (UK) released some educational resources for free. However, the most commonly known OER initiative came from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) in 200. By the year 2002, it had released 32 courses with open licenses and set a precedent in terms of university courseware.
In 2002, UNESCO convened the forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries, where OER was coined. Since then, many other education service providers have used open licenses and Internet to share teaching and learning resources.
The Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2008) and the Paris OER Declaration (2012) provided guidelines and encouragement for governments to release educational resources-especially those created using public funding with open licenses. OER's integration into national policy is an ongoing and slow process, but there has been a continuous success.
Under NMEICT, a proper balance between content generations, research in critical areas relating to the imparting of education and connectivity for integrating our knowledge with the advancements in other countries is to be attempted. This mission seeks to support such initiatives and build upon the synergies between various efforts by adopting a holistic approach. Emphasis on ICT is a crying need as it acts as a multiplier for capacity building efforts of educational institutions without compromising the quality. The mission is also necessary to sustain a high growth rate of our economy through capacity building and knowledge empowerment of the people and promoting new, upcoming multi-disciplinary fields of knowledge.
What are Open Educational Resources (OERs)?
In its simplest form, the concept of Open Educational Resources (OER) describes any educational resources (including curriculum maps, course materials, textbooks, streaming videos, multimedia applications, podcasts, and any other materials that have been designed for use in teaching and learning) that are openly available for use by educators and learners, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or license fees.
The term OER is mostly synonymous as- Open CourseWare (OCW), although the latter may be used to refer to a specific, more structured subset of OER. An Open CourseWare is defined by the OCW Consortium as 'a free and open digital publication of high-quality university-level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content’.
Is the OER as same as e-learning?
The OER is not synonymous with online learning or e-learning, although many people make the mistake of using the terms interchangeably. Openly licensed content can be produced in any medium: paper-based text, video, audio, or computer-based multimedia. A lot of e-learning courses may harness OER, but this does not mean that OER is necessarily e-learning.
Is the OER the same as open learning/open education?
Although the use of OER can support open learning/open education, OER and open education are not the same. Making 'open education' or 'open learning' a priority has more significant implications than only committing to releasing resources as open or using OER in educational programmes. Open education requires a systematic analysis of assessment and accreditation systems, student support, curriculum frameworks, and mechanisms to recognize prior learning, and so on.