Guides: North Metropolitan TAFE: Reusable content: Open Education Resources

Useful OER Repositories

Australian Curriculum This site houses a range of resources that can be used to support teachers as they implement the Australian Curriculum.
Australian Curriculum & Assessment Authority (ACARA) ACARA offers the Australian curriculum as an OER.
CK-12 Offers free open content in primary and high school level maths, science, technology, engineering and many more subjects.
Connexions Offers learning objects organised into textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, searchable by author, title, subject areas, language, publication date and popularity.
Curriki Offers topics including subject areas, education levels, material type, languages and review ratings for all levels of education.
Fliplets A government website which offers Certificate I Hospitality OER through a contextualised eLearning package.
MERLOT Provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
OER Commons Provides over 160,000 OER easily searchable by refinable topics including subject areas, education levels, material type and media formats for all levels of education.
Open Professional Education Network Here you will find openly licensed media elements to use within your courses.
Free Music Archive Music you can use in the classroom, most of which is licensed under creative commons

Open Education

FAQs

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?
OER are teaching and learning materials that are freely available for everyone to use.

What licences are Open Educational Resources available under?
OER resources are licenced under Creative Commons (CC) licences. The great thing is that all CC licences allow works to be used for educational purposes. As a result, lecturers can freely copy, share and sometimes modify and remix a CC work without having to seek permission from the creator.

Why is it preferable for lecturers to use Open Educational Resources?
The current copyright licences and free use exceptions for educational use by lecturers are expensive, restrictive and complicated. Lecturers downloading, saving, printing or emailing pages from the internet will attract fees payable under the education statutory licence.

Where can I find Open Educational Resources?
There is an abundance of OER materials open for everyone to use and available on the Internet. However, the key is knowing where to find such materials. Some OER repositories are listed opposite.