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

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 or re-purpose, so that it is available to others (for re-use or re-purposing), to sustain a virtuous cycle of receiving-giving.

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.

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 accessible to anyone, any time. Publishing content on-line is making a copy of your personal digital library available on the global digital library, that the web is.

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

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.

There are many 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.

You can also contribute your content to Wikipedia. In case the page does not exist in Wikipedia, you can create the page as well, this is the way this encyclopedia has grown to be the most referred to encyclopedia. You can edit the relevant page in Wikipedia, if it page is already existing. Contributing to Wikipedia is even more important if you are creating an OER in a language other than English. Most languages of the world are not well represented on Wikipedia (see List of Wikipedias), especially languages spoken in the developing countries. Since Wikipedia is a very popular encyclopedia, if you could regularly contribute your OER to Wikipedia, it would be useful to 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) for publishing a text document. Again you should prefer an odt over a docx format (open v/s closed formats).

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.

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.

Image - 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, Academia
3	Image OER	Wikimedia commons
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

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

FOSS applications used in the tool-kit

No	Category	Name	File format	More information (Wikipedia)	Application Home Page	Tutorials	User Manual
1	Text OER	Freeplane	.mm	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeplane	https://www.freeplane.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKt9Bm9krBM
2	Text OER	LibreOffice Writer	.odt	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice_Writer	https://libreoffice.org/Main_Page	https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94682FC0D2ADF410	https://help.libreoffice.org/Writer/Instructions_for_Using_Writer
3	Text OER	LibreOffice Impress	.odp	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice	https://libreoffice.org/Main_Page	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR7yVoPn2bs	https://help.libreoffice.org/Impress/Instructions_for_Using_Impress
4	Image OER	Screenshot	.png	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenshot	-	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki4SBEkwmM0
5	Image OER	Tux Paint	.png	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux_Paint	http://tuxpaint.org	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6hKk-0dzKA, nowiki>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJcQzGrS9So</nowiki>	http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Tux-Paint-with-Your-Kids
6	Image OER	GIMP	.png	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP	https://www.gimp.org	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZr8mBLiY8Y
7	Animation OER	Tux Paint	.png	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux_Paint	http://tuxpaint.org/, nowiki>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJcQzGrS9So</nowiki>	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6hKk-0dzKA
0	Audio OER	Audacity	.wav/.mp3	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacity_(audio_editor)	http://www.audacityteam.org/	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E5uRJlXgfk, nowiki>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E5uRJlXgfk</wikinow	http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorials.html
9	Video OER	recordmydesktop	.ogv	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RecordMyDesktop	http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/about.php	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-nAcMK6m_I
10	Video OER	OpenShot	.osp/.mp4	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenShot	http://www.openshot.org/	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDbQr0hNVZs

FOSS alternatives on other platforms

No	Category	Name	Alternatives on GNU/Linux	On Windows operating system	On Mobile phone
1	Text OER	Freeplane	Freemind	Freeplane	Freeplane Reader
2	Text OER	LibreOffice Writer	Apache OpenOffice Writer	LibreOffice Writer	Open Document Viewer
3	Text OER	LibreOffice Impress	Sozi	LibreOffice Impress	Open Document Viewer
4	Image OER	Screenshot	Shutter, Lightscreen	PicPick, Snagit	Screen Capture
5	Image OER	Tux Paint	Kolor Paint, My Paint, GIMP	Kolour Paint, MS Paint	Paint
6	Image OER	GIMP	LibreOffice Draw	GIMP, LibreOffice Draw	Photo Editor, Collage Photo editor
7	Animation OER	Tux Paint	Tupi	KtooN
0	Audio OER	Audacity	Ocean Audio, Kwave	Audacity	Audio Editor, Ringtone Cutter
9	Video OER	recordmydesktop	Kazam	Cam Studio	AZ Screen Recorder
10	Video OER	OpenShot	Kdenlive	OpenShot editor, Windows Movie Maker