OER (Open Educational Resources) are freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational assessment and research purposes i.e. They include learning content (course materials), tools (software
to create and manage open learning content) and licenses.
OER lowers the cost of educational materials, develops innovative content and provides continuous improvement in quality of education. In our previous article, we’ve covered 10 Open Education Resource (OER) Tools. Now we’ll let you know about OER Search Engines which help you in finding quality educational content.
Google University Learning:
Google University Learning
brings you the collection of OCW (Open Course Ware) and OER (Open Educational Resources) sites in its search results. You can add this gadget to your Google home page for better usage.
DiscoverEd:
DiscoverEd
is a search prototype developed by Creative Commons dedicated to providing open educational resources on the Web. While most search engines rely solely on algorithmic analyses of resources, DiscoverEd can incorporate data provided by the resource publisher or curator.
Federal Resources for Educational Excellence:
http://free.ed.gov/
(abbreviation for Federal Resources for Educational Excellence) allows educators, students, administrators to easily find digital teaching and learning resources created and maintained by the Federal Government and public and private organizations. It’s a search engine because it won’t store or mandate particular curricula or lesson plans, it only contains links to learning resources created by many organizations and initiatives. You can browse either by subject or by standard.
OER Dynamic Search Engine:
OER Dynamic Search Engine
has many more site links which store Open Educational Resources. If you know a site which has OER content but not listed in this search engine, you can add it freely.
OpenTapestry:
OpenTapestry
is an excellent search engine which brings open licensed educational resources from all over the Web. It has advanced search options where you can choose your content from numerous subjects. It’s having social networking features as well as tools to create and manage online content.
OpenTapestry has closed now.
Creative Commons:
Creative Commons
is a non–profit organization that allows users to exchange creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. If you want to give people the right to share, use, and even build upon the work you’ve created, you should consider publishing it under a Creative Commons license. If you want to find a free course material from world’s top universities, creative commons is the best option for you. It allows you to search your content using a specific website of your choice (from numerous sites like Flickr, YouTube, Google Images, etc.).
OER Commons:
OER Commons
is a project created by ISKME (Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education). Most of the content created on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. It brings over 48,000 OER for sharing curriculum with the world. OER Commons team designs custom tools to support OER networks. It has an efficient search options: you can discover new resources or search by using an advanced (with lot of filtering options) search option.
Open Course Ware Consortium:
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world dedicated to creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. It allows you to search courses in multiple languages.
The above mentioned are the greatest OER search engines where you can find the best content from around the world. We hope this information is useful to you. If you know a few more search engines like these, please share with us in the comment box.
