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- Expertise in curating and sharing OER effectively.
- Communication and research skills to be able to share information about OER.
Capacity building should also focus on the people and institutions required to enable effective use of OER. This would involve:
- Raising awareness of the potential of OER and the requirements for successful use.
- Supporting policy-makers and heads of institutions to understand the key elements necessary to create supportive policy environments, develop materials, use technology, and conduct research.
- Identifying best-practice examples of use of OER and facilitating institutional visits, so that participants have an opportunity not only to observe effective use of OER in practice but also to start developing support networks and communities of practice.
Where do I find OER?
The scope and availability of OER is ever expanding. Every week, new resources are being added to the global body of resources. A current problem arising out of this growth is that there is no single comprehensive listing of all OER (nor, given the rapid expansion of content online, is there ever likely to be one). This means that, in order to find appropriate OER, the searcher will need to employ a number of search strategies:
- Use a specialized OER search engine: While search engines such as Google and Bing are a good general starting point for finding content online, there are also some specialized search engines that search specifically for OER. Their listings, however, are selective based on different search criteria so it is a good idea to try more than one. Here are a few of the popular ones:
- Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) Alliance: www.globeinfo.org.
- Folksemantic: www.folksemantic.com.
- DiscoverEd: http://discovered.labs.creativecommons.org/search/en.
- Creative Commons Search: http://search.creativecommons.org.
- Open Courseware Consortium: www.ocwconsortium.org/courses/search.
- Locate a suitable OER repository: Searchers should also access the major OER repositories to search for OER. Most are institutionally based, focusing on the materials released by that organization. A famous example is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Courseware Repository (MIT OCW). Some repositories, such as MedEd PORTAL, have a specific subject focus, in this
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