Connecting the Dots between Open Access and Open Educational Resources

From textbooks to course materials, videos to software, journals to digital collections, Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain, or carry a license that permits their free access and use by all users. Like the Open Access movement, the aim of many OER proponents is for anyone, anytime, anywhere to be able to access and contribute to the advancement of knowledge.

Since being ignited in 2001 by MIT’s ambitious OpenCourseWare project, the OER movement has rapidly grown in scope and intensity, with successful projects initiatives springing up around the world. Over the past 12 months, OER’s have achieved even greater visibility with adoption of the 2012 Paris OER Declaration at the recent UNESCO congress, and the passage of the first U.S. Open Source Textbook legislation by the California State Senate.

A panel of three OER experts will talk about these developments and much more - including the basics of OERs, the sate of important current OER initiatives, the relevance of OERs to the library community, and the intersections of OER and Open Access.

Featured speakers will include:

• Nicole Allen: Director of the Make Textbooks Affordable project at Student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups)

• Dr. Daniel Mietchen: a biophysicist at the University of Jena, and “Wikimedian in Residence” on Open Science;

• Timothy Vollmer: Policy Manager and Open Data Coordinator for Creative Commons

To accommodate interest in every time zone, this 1-hour event will be recorded and available on our website shortly afterwards.

Please join us for lively and interaction discussion. For additional information, contact SPARC’s Communication’s Manager, Andrea Higginbotham at andrea [at] arl [dot] org.