In Focus
Notable Open Education Resources (OERs)
We are pleased to bring you the following list of OER sites recommended by mEducation Alliance members and other OER champions.
PhET
The PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations that allow students to learn and experience STEM through their intuitive, game-like features. Beyond the 160 interactive simulations, 95 language translations, and 2993 teacher-submitted lessons available to students, PhET provides teachers with access to simulation specific tips and resources to help integrate simulations into the classroom.
You can find more information here: https://phet.colorado.edu/
Learning Equality - Kolibri
Learning Equality is committed to enabling every person in the world to realize their right to a quality education. By leveraging on converging trends — such as the increase in numbers of open educational resources, low-cost computing hardware, technology-enhanced pedagogical tools, and sneakernet sharing — Learning Equality builds and supports educational tools that are flexible and lightweight, empowering for communities, and designed for everyone. Their most recent tool, Kolibri, is an adaptable set of open solutions specially created to support learning for the half of the world without internet access. Centered around an offline-first learning platform that runs on a variety of low-cost and legacy devices, the Kolibri Product Ecosystem includes a curricular tool, a library of open educational resources, and a toolkit of resources to support training and implementation.
You can find more information here: https://learningequality.org/
CommonLit
CommonLit is a nonprofit education technology organization dedicated to ensuring that all students, especially students in Title I schools, graduate with the reading, writing, communication, and problem-solving skills they need to be successful in college and beyond. They provide over 2000 high-quality free reading passages for grades 3-12, complemented by aligned interim assessments, growth-oriented data, and expert-led teacher development. Their latest development, the CommonLit 360 Curriculum, is a free, comprehensive full-year English language Arts Curriculum for grades 6-10 that offers six units per grade level and a variety of other features.
You can find more information here: https://www.commonlit.org/en/about
Siyavula
Siyavula Education is a company with a mission to make high quality education as accessible as possible to every learner and teacher. Siyavula emerged from the Free High School Science Texts project, which began publishing OERs in 2002, and from there grew into the company it is today, which is one that focuses on increasing access to mathematics and science related OERs through various formats and mediums. Siyavula has developed openly-licensed, curriculum-aligned textbooks for maths and science. The open textbooks were developed in collaboration with a wide community of volunteers. This content is freely-accessible to read and download online, over mobile and as ePUBs.
You can find more information here: https://intl.siyavula.com/
Saide - African Storybook
The aim of the African Storybook (ASb) initiative is to support and promote literacy in African languages by utilizing openly licensed digital storybooks that are made available through web-based internet and mobile app services. ASb recognizes the severe shortage of contextually appropriate materials for young African children learning to read, particularly in indigenous languages. To rectify this problem, their website offers thousands of openly licensed picture storybooks in the languages of Africa for children’s literacy, enjoyment and imagination. Additionally, their website includes tools for the translation, adaptation and creation of picture storybooks for children aged two to ten, and a reading app downloadable from Google Play and the iStore to give parents and children access to the storybooks even when they are offline.
You can find more information here: https://www.africanstorybook.org/
OER Commons
OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources that allows its users to explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculums. In addition to their extensive collections curated by digital librarians, OER Commons now offers a tool called Open Author, which allows users to build, remix, customize, and publish their own OERs. To utilize the Open Author tool, you must create an account and click “Add OER”.
You can find more information here: https://www.oercommons.org/
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity by providing Creative Commons Licenses and public domain tools that give every person and organization in the world the free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works; ensure proper attribution; and allow others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works. With 2 billion Creative Commons Licensed works and counting, all ranging from literary works, to videos, photos, audio, open education, scientific research and more — Creative Commons is working to make knowledge more accessible to all.
You can find more information here: https://creativecommons.org/
Commonwealth of Learning
The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government in 1987 to promote the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies. COL’s greatest impact lies in its support of efforts that provide Commonwealth citizens greater access to quality education and training through open, distance and technology-enabled learning, thereby allowing them to benefit from improved livelihoods, greater gender equity and overall economic, social and cultural development leading to sustainable development. Moreover, through their OER for Skills Development project, COL has worked with approximately 80 institutions at different levels of the educational spectrum to support capacity building in OER, the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in teaching and learning, policy development for OER and the development of relevant courses by repurposing OER.
You can find more information here: https://www.col.org/
OER Africa
OER Africa was established in 2008 with a vision to support the emergence of vibrant and sustainable African education systems and institutions that play a critical role in building and sustaining African societies and economies through free and open development and sharing of common intellectual capital. To carry out this mission, OER Africa has undertaken collaborative work to develop the professional competences and skills of stakeholders within African higher education institutions so that they can implement OER practices to improve the quality of teaching and learning. Moreover, the OER Africa website aims to be the primary place to find African-produced OER and provides helpful resources for readers and users to gain up to date information regarding OER developments in Africa.
You can find more information here: https://www.oerafrica.org/
Madrasa.org
Madrasa.org provides Arabic children with an online learning platform where informational videos are organized by topic. This gives children the ability to learn about fundamental school subjects through the internet. These subjects include Future Science for kids, Arabic, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, General Science, and Mathematics.
You can find more information here: https://madrasa.org/
Pratham Books - StoryWeaver
Pratham Books is passionate about building an inclusive and joyful reading culture in India. They work to help children in underserved communities obtain increased access to resources for reading. One of their main products is StoryWeaver, which is a digital platform where children have access to multilingual storybooks, enabling them to learn and practice reading skills. The platform provides tools which can translate stories into different languages or create new stories using the illustrations available. StoryWeaver opens the door to a vast library of books for the next generation of readers.
You can find more information here: https://prathambooks.org/
Global Digital Library
The Global Digital Library (GDL) is an open-source library for schools, donor agencies and their partners, publishers, digital distributors and content providers, parents, and children. GDL was developed to increase the availability of high-quality reading resources, including reading instruction books and storybooks for leisure reading. Existing books are sourced from international education partners, which include African Storybook, BookDash, and 3asafeer. Individuals can also contribute by translating books. Right now, the Global Digital Library has over 6000 books in 83 languages, and also provides children with literacy and numeracy games.
You can find more information here: https://digitallibrary.io/
NABU
NABU is a digital reading app and mother tongue publishing platform making literacy accessible to children globally. Their mission is to solve the imbalance in children’s book creation and distribution, aiming for all children to be able to read and rise to their full potential. To reach this goal, NABU creates free children’s books, and champions mother tongue stories, looking to build an inclusive and diverse platform. By offering training for writers and illustrators, they create original local language books that support children’s literacy development.
You can find more information here: https://www.nabu.org/
SIL International - Bloom Library
SIL International understands that it is important for there to be a large amount of reading material in a non-dominant language community to make reading worthwhile and give the practice needed to develop true literacy. Working towards better literacy in underrepresented languages, SIL helps language communities create reading materials using Bloom, an easy to use software that allows users to create books in many languages. This software facilitates translating the book, recording an audio reading of the book, and then publishing it in various print and digital forms. The Bloom Library contains more than 5000 books that can be downloaded and translated. Through the Bloom Reader App, people can download the audio books created by Bloom and have text highlighted as the reader is listening to facilitate learning.
You can find more information here: https://bloomlibrary.org/
UNESCO & OER Dynamic Coalition
The OER Dynamic Coalition was established to support the implementation of the UNESCO OER Recommendation, consisting of stakeholders from member states and National Commissions for UNESCO. The recommendation is structured around five action areas:
- Building capacity of stakeholders to create, access, reuse, adapt and redistribute OER
- Developing supportive policy
- Encouraging effective, inclusive and equitable access to quality OER
- Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER
- Promoting and reinforcing international cooperation
You can find more information here: https://en.unesco.org/themes/building-knowledge-societies/oer/dynamic-coalition
Book Dash
Book Dash is a social impact publisher of free books for very young children in South Africa, and provides children with a vast collection of books before they enter school. They believe that “every child should own one hundred books by the age of five.” Creative professionals volunteer to create new African storybooks that anyone can translate and distribute. Then these stories are shared on their website and published physically for children to own, giving a foundation for lifelong academic success.
You can find more information here: https://bookdash.org/
Ubongo
Ubongo aims to equip Africa’s next generation with a strong educational foundation, critical skills, and positive mindsets to improve their own lives and their overall community for the better. To reach this goal, Ubongo creates fun, localized and multi-platform educational media which reaches 17 million households through accessible technologies. These programs prepare kids for school, improve learning outcomes, and promote social and behavioral change. They work directly with children and caregivers to ensure that their content has a real impact on people’s lives. Ubongo’s process involves human-centered research, powerful storytelling, large-scale distribution, and rigorous impact analysis to fulfill their vision.
You can find more information here: https://www.ubongo.org/
Oppia
Oppia is an online learning tool that enables anyone to easily create and share interactive activities (called ‘explorations’). These activities simulate a one-on-one conversation with a tutor, making it possible for students to learn by doing while getting feedback. The Oppia Classroom’s curated math foundations course teaches the basic building blocks of math, covering essential concepts like addition, multiplication and fractions. Once a student has mastered these basic concepts, they will move onto more advanced lessons.
You can find more information here: https://www.oppia.org/
