Open Educational Resources

"Creative Commons Officially Launches a Search Engine that Indexes 300+ Million Public Domain Images" (post) introduces "CC Search, a search engine that indexes over 300 million images."

A. "Welcome to the Open Library: The Home of the Open Educational Resources (OERS) in Ontario" (web page) allows instructors to do the following:

1. Find

• "Search our collection of open texbooks and other open resources."

• "The curated collection aligns with top subject areas in post-secondary education and features reviews from experts and educators across Canada."

2. Customize

eCampusOntario is committed to raising awareness about the value and use of open educational resources (OER) and building capacity and expertise within member institutions to support a sustainable open education strategy for Ontario. A critical component of this strategy is the Open Education (OE) Fellows program. The program provides six (6) OE Fellows the opportunity to explore applied possibilities for OER to improve teaching practice and build learner-centred, open pedagogic models for others to refine and/or adopt.

Application submission due date is Monday, January 28, 2019 at 5:00 pm. 

Full details, including a link to the application package is available on the Call for Participation website.

A. "How to Download Thousands of Classic Books and Movies That Just Entered the Public Domain" (post) celebrates the fact that "[b]ecause the [American] copyright on works published between 1923 and 1977 is good for 95 years, this [2019] marks the first time in decades that a large number of books, movies, and songs has entered the public domain" and lists several points of access for these materials:

"Where Are All the Faculty in the Open Education Movement?" (online article) notes that there is "growing dissatisfaction of textbook costs and pedagogical concerns among faculty about outdated course materials" and asks, "[W]hy are are there so few [academic] practitioners actively involved in increasing open education?" 

A. Challenges