Role of Open Education Resources (OER)
Open educational resources have a potential to revolutionise education by making education accessible to all. Open educational resources can take many forms but generally take the form of text, images and videos. Even openness can have many forms. Some believe that only resources in public domain or resources released under open licenses like Creative Commons licenses are open. Others regard anything accessible for free by anyone as open resources.
According to Wikipedia the term Open Education Resources was firstly coined at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on Open Courseware and designates “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work”.
According to Wikipedia the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation defines OER as:
teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
World over governments are very serious about promoting open educational resources. Unfortunately the user experience of most OER sites is not upto the mark. I personally found it difficult to find stuff on some sites. Some sites were easy to use if you know what to find. Unfortunately most parents and kids do not know what to find. They need something like Khan Academy.
I personally found the best user experience in Khan Academy. Khan Academy which was started by Salman Khan has become the defacto place to go to learn concepts being taught in school. Khan Academy’s videos are not openly licensed. I checked a few videos and they had Standard YouTube License. Standard YouTube License is not an open license. We can only watch Khan Academy’s videos for free. We can watch them from anywhere we can access the internet. Unfortunately we cannot edit them or use them in our own work without explicitly taking permission.
What we need is the user experience of visiting Khan Academy with the openness of wikipedia to get the best of all worlds. Wikipedia itself has started Wikiversity to promote open education. It has been helpful but has not been as successful as Wikipedia or Khan Academy.
We need open education resources categorised by class and subject to make open educational resources useful for parents and kids. We also need to make open educational resources fun to use.
Teachers play a major role in school education. At home most kids do not want to study if the resource is not fun to use. Without a teacher it becomes difficult to make a student learn on his own. We need resources which provide fun and entertainment which pulls a kid to do them. Mobile applications and games are good examples of things which pull people to use them. We need resources that motivate a kid to learn. The resources can use design, graphics, stories, songs etc to make them fun to use.
At Fun2Do Labs we are trying to make education open and fun at the same time. Education problem of the world cannot be solved till the time all kids have access to education and till the time kids want education themselves. If education remains a necessary evil for kids no amount of money or technology can make kids educated. Only education which kids want and which is freely available for everyone to use can solve the education problem of the world.
The following are the animated math stories published by Fun2Do Labs
Stories and song for teaching lines and shapes
- Math Story : Types Of Lines | A Night At The Amusement Park
- Math Story : Circle And Its Basic Properties — Trip To Candy Land
- Math Story : Square And Its Basic Properties — When Squaro Is Upset
- Math Story : Rectangle And Its Basic Properties | The Pole Mystery
- Math Story : Triangle And Its Basic Properties | The Rocky Pointed Land
- Shapes Song For Kids : Learn Circle, Triangle, Square, Rectangle and Star from Uncle Math
Stories for teaching numbers and counting
- Math Story: Counting Up To 10 | Triho’s Surprise Birthday Party
- Math Story : Forward And Backwards Counting Up To 10 | The Hurdle Race
- Math Story: Ordinal Numbers | Fun Time At The Sanctuary
- Math Story : Counting In Tens And Ones | Uncle Science And His Farm
- Math Story : Introduction To Zero — Camping and Zero
- Math Story : Even and Odd Numbers | Mr Perfect Pair
- Math Story : 3 Digit Place Value | One With The Tallest Building
Stories for teaching number comparison
- Math Story : Introduction To Number Comparison | Who Ran More?
- Math Story : Number Comparison | Max The Number Alligator
- Math Story : Ascending And Descending Order Of Numbers (Up To 10) | The Office Attack
Stories for teaching addition, subtraction, multiplication and division
- Math Story : Introduction To Addition — Who Ate More Ice Creams?
- Math Story: Introduction To Subtraction | Fun With Ms Subtract
- Math Story : Introduction To Multiples — When Uncle Math Is Sick
- Math Story : Long Division Method — Visit To The Fruits Planet
- Math Story : Relation Between Multiplication And Division | Atriho Boss And His Revenge
