Teachers' toolkit for creating and re-purposing OER using FOSS/Publishing OER

Technology for creation and self-expression has become one of the defining features of the increased ICT availability of ICT in today's society. OER allows for this creativity and expression; in fact, the power of OER is in its re-use by others, creating a rich learning environment. You benefit from OER, by being able to access a variety of resources for your various learning and teaching needs. Likewise, it is important for you to publish the OER you create, so that it is available to others (for further re-use or re-purposing), to sustain a virtuous cycle of receiving-giving (access->create->publish).

It is also important for you to access existing OER, revise them to make them more valuable (by improving their accuracy or comprehensiveness, by contextualising them, by translating them etc.), and publishing the revised OER. Such re-purposing and publishing will make it easier for others to get OER that they want (access->re-purpose->publish).

You have so far maintained your OER in your own computer in your personal digital library. This is accessible only to you. However if you publish your OER on the world wide web, it will be available to anyone, any time. Publishing content on-line is making available, a copy of your personal digital library on the the web, which is like a global digital library.

You can publish your content in one of two ways (or both):

1. Maintaining your own web space or blog and making available your resources
2. Contributing your creations to different OER repositories

Creating your own web space and publishing OER

You can create your own (blog) site on Wordpress. If you would like to upload all your OER in a single place to make it available to others, this is a good option. Wordpress is a simple software for you to manage your web content. You could also maintain your own blogs with an organized collection of all OER created by you.

Publishing in existing repositories

You can publish your OER in popular OER repositories, some of which have been mentioned earlier in this toolkit. This chapter briefly discusses OER repositories where you could publish the OER you create or re-purpose.

Publishing text OER

There are OER repositories for uploading your text resources. WikiEducator is a repository specially for sharing educational content. Slideshare and Academia.edu are popular web sites where you can upload your presentation slides and text documents. It is important to note here that even if you are contributing your resource to a repository that is not OER, you could make your resources OER for anyone to access. Remember always to specify the license of the OER you upload. If you do not specify any license, then the default license 'all rights reserved' will apply, which will make your content a 'non-OER'. You can choose from a variety of Creative Commons licenses.

You can also contribute your content to Wikipedia, the most visited OER in the world. You can either create a new webpage or edit an existing page on Wikipedia. A collaborative community has been the way this encyclopedia has grown to be the most referred-to encyclopedia. Contributing to Wikipedia is even more important if you are creating an OER in a language other than English. Most languages of the world, especially languages spoken in the developing countries, are not well represented on Wikipedia (see List of Wikipedias). Since Wikipedia is a popular encyclopedia, if you could regularly contribute your OER to Wikipedia, it would be seen by many others. You will need to follow the editing guidelines of Wikipedia.

As mentioned, you should publish in formats that are open and easier to edit. A web page is usually in the .html format which is an open format. In case you are uploading a document (file) on-line, you should prefer an odt over a pdf format (editable v/s non-editable format) for publishing a text document. Again you should prefer an odt over a docx format (open v/s closed formats).

Publishing image OER

Image OER can be uploaded on Wikimedia commons. Other options include Flickr.

Publishing audio and video OER

Audio OER can be uploaded on Soundcloud

Video OER can be uploaded on Youtube. You should ensure to select the Creative Commons license when you upload your video OER, to ensure that it is available freely to others.

Specifying CC license for video uploaded on Youtube

Vimeo is another popular site for uploading OER videos.

The table below provides the web spaces available for you to publish your OER.

No	Category	Site for publishing OER on-line
1	Text OER	Wikipedia, WikiEducator
2	Text OER – Presentations	Slideshare and Academia.edu
3	Image OER	Wikimedia commons, Flickr.
4	Audio OER	Soundcloud
5	Video OER	Youtube, Vimeo

Note

1. Before uploading your OER, you will need to register or create a login id on the site
2. You need to ensure that you have not used any non-open (copyright) materials in making your OER.

Popular OER repositories

1. Some of the large-scale repositories created through the OER movement include:
2. OpenCourseWare,
3. OER Commons,
4. Merlot
5. Khan Academy
6. OpenLearn

You should refer to these, while creating or re-purposing your OER.

Pages or articles listing OER repositories

You can get a list of OER repositories from the following web pages:

1. Wikipedia
2. WikiEducator
3. COL Workshop on OER
4. DiscoverEd from the Creative Commons
5. Edutopia
6. Nova Library