The Open Education Resources (OER) movement is credited to an MIT OpenCourseWare project in 2001 which was followed in 2002 by putting their entire course catalog online (Wikipedia, 2013). This began an openly accessible source of almost limitless learning potential. One of the most popular OER sites is Kahn Academy.

Founded by Salman Khan, the Kahn Academy has grown from Kahn tutoring his cousin via Yahoo’s Doodle Notepad in 2004, to an international phenomenon with more than 1 million subscribers viewing over 260 million lessons on thousands of topics (Kahn Academy, 2013). Through short video clips over 1400 subjects are covered, from basic to advanced topics. My personal experience with Kahn came in 2012 when I took a graduate statistics course and needed help grasping difficult concepts. For absolutely no fee I was able to watch, again and again as needed, videos on each advanced concept which thoroughly explained each topic and visually demonstrated each equation on an electronic grease board. Perhaps I would have found another way to get help, but I feel this resource saved me from floundering in the murky waters of inferential statistics!

The lessons allow for practice, testing for comprehension, statistics regarding progress and participation, and achievement recognition through a badge system. This is a global classroom that, if the student chooses, can be accessed by educators as well. This would be invaluable to teachers who can look at a glance and see how their students are progressing with a complete summary of class performance. Kahn Academy does the record keeping, the data compilation, and even makes statistical charts available at no cost. I believe this resource is a revolutionary enhancement to the educational environment.

While Kahn Academy is best considered a tutoring resource, the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) mentioned in my introduction not only started the OER movement, but continues to this day as a very effective resource for students, self-learners, and educators. Students use OCW to enhance knowledge in a subject they are taking, to complement a course they are taking, and to plan a course of study. Self-learners would be learners who are not currently enrolled in a course but desire to learn more outside of their area of expertise, enhance their area of expertise, keep up with continuing education in their area of expertise, and apply new knowledge to a work related project. Educators can learn new teaching methods, develop curriculum, use OCW materials in their own classroom, and acquire continuing education. As of 2011 127 million visits had been made to the OCW site, with over 50% of the traffic coming from outside the United States. They have a total of 1018 courses (MITOPENCOURSEWARE, 2013).

The scope of these sites is tremendous. Between just these two sites (leaders in OER offerings) nearly a half a billion lessons have been delivered, for free! These are valuable resources that completely change the educational landscape. As an educator, I would make use of OER resources to continue my own education and maintain state of the art and best practices. I would use material from OER resources in classrooms and refer students for tutorials and research purposes. These resources will enhance any online educational environment and increase both educator and learner success. Please see the URLs in References below for more details.

References

Kahn Academy (2013). A free world-class education for anyone anywhere. Retrieved 10-08-13, from http://www.khanacademy.org/about

MITOPENCOURSEWARE (2013). Site statistics. Retrieved 10-10-13, from http://ocw.mit.edu/about/site-statistics/

Wikipedia (2013). Open educational resources. Retrieved 10-08-13, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources