About OER

At the heart of the movement towards Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use and reuse knowledge.
(Atkins, Brown, & Hammond, 2007, p. 5)

An overwhelming amount of information about OER is available on the internet. Here are some links to help you to gain a better understanding of the exciting opportunities and challenges that OER provides.

Basic OER Training
An overview of Open Educational Resources employing Webinars.
Creative Commons Licence Tool
Helps you choose the right Creative Commons Licence for your work.
Introduction to Open Educational Resources
A self-paced tutorial about open educational resources by conneXions.
JISC Open Educational Resources infoKit
This toolkit provides information and guidance to Higher Education OER participants on issues relating to institutional adoption of OER. These range from specific technical issues to barriers and enablers to institutional adoption.
Open content licensing for educators course
A free online workshop for educators and students who want to learn more about open education resources, copyright, and creative commons licenses.
OER Africa Copyright and Licencing Toolkit
This toolkit is aimed at the Higher Education community working with OER. The toolkit deals with copyright, licencing and copy right clearance.
OER Africa Frequently Asked Questions on OER
A short introduction to everything you need to know about OER.
OER Readiness in Africa
A report focussing on the technological and human factors that have a bearing on the distribution and use of OER in Africa.
Open Educational Resources: An Asian Perspective
This book, the result of an OER Asia research project hosted and implemented by the Wawasan Open University in Malaysia, with support from Canada's International Development Research Centre, brings together ten country reports and ten case studies on OER in the Asian region that highlight typical situations in each context.
Support Centre for Open Educational Resources in Education (SCORE)
Some useful publications that reflect the range of reports and research around OER.

About OER at Unisa

Over the last five years, Unisa has committed to making sense of the new opportunities and challenges presented by OER. Having lived through many changes to the shape of education, Unisa is no stranger to new forms of thought and we have not simply followed the OER momentum. Rather, as a community we have shown our intent to help sculpt the conversation around OER and to be a vibrant African voice in this process. We have engaged in research to explore some of the questions around OER and made efforts to create tangible opportunities for educators and scholars to benefit from OER.

Unisa has shown its intent to embrace OER and is currently in the process of developing an OER policy for the institution. Unisa already has some crucial approved strategies, policies and plans in place which are conducive to embracing OER:

These four documents make provision for the prescription of OER for modules, the use of open licensing, the creating of a portal to showcase Unisa OER, support sourcing and evaluating OER for use as well as for providing support and tools to use and develop OER.

The OER movement’s aspiration to open access strongly resonates with our open distance learning model where spatial, geographical, economic and demographic boundaries must be reduced to facilitate and increase access to higher education. We are in no doubt about the powerful potential of OER to change the nature of our social relations. By radically reconceptualising normative educational practices in our schools and in our universities, OER will change the way we think about education on our continent, but it will do so only when we have carefully considered its distinct advantages and usages for Africa.
(Personal communication between Prof Makanya and Mr Nzimande, 7 December 2011)

One of the big challenges in starting the journey into OER is finding the best OER for use, re-use, production and sharing in the development of new OER. Unisa Open is a portal to help students, staff and any OER users and producers worldwide to source high-quality resources. It provides a space for conversation and a starting point for those just making their acquaintance with OER. It also provides a showcase for the OER work being conducted at Unisa. This website serves as a reference to some of the key OER available to illustrate the type of resources currently in existence. If we have missed something, share the link so we can add it to our growing portal.