The production of digital materials to support teaching (notes, slides, graphic resources, videos, audios, etc.) is common in our University for some time. The last few months, with the intensification of digital teaching, has further boosted this production. And many of these materials are being distributed as open educational resources (resources that are distributed in a way that facilitates their use, adaptation, and free distribution).

For this reason, the OfiLibre initiated a campaign to collect open educational materials produced by professors of our University, and used in our courses. Now, well into the new academic year, we want this campaign to reach the entire University Community, to give all professors the opportunity to participate in it.

What are open educational resources?

The UNESCO defines open educational resources (OER) as “teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or published with intellectual property licenses that facilitate their use, adaptation, and free distribution”. They consider that OER “offer a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education and dialogue on policies, exchange of knowledge, and capacity building”.

Why a catalog of OER from the URJC?

We think that a Catalog of Open Educational Resources from the URJC, which collects OER produced by professors of our University and used in it, will serve several purposes:

  • Make visible a commendable activity, voluntarily carried out by many professors of our University, with clear social utility.

  • Allow our students to access open educational resources produced in our University in a simple and coordinated way, both for the degrees they are enrolled in and for others that may be of interest to them. Anyone else interested can also access these resources.

  • Serve as an archive of OER so that any professor can use these materials, giving the necessary recognition to their authors, for their courses.

  • Act as a meeting point between professors creating OER in the same teaching area, giving them opportunities to collaborate in the creation of materials and favoring the exchange of experiences.

  • Serve as a mechanism for accrediting the work done. In the future, the OfiLibre could extend accreditation documents for professors to use wherever they need to show their work in this field.

How to send OER for inclusion in the catalog?

Any professor can follow the instructions indicated in the news of the campaign to collect open materials from the URJC to request that their open educational resources be included in the Catalog of OER from the URJC. In brief, these instructions consist of sending us a message with the data of the OER to be sent.

What type of materials can be included in the catalog?

Any digital educational resource (notes, books, essays, slides, videos, audios, graphic collections, computer programs, etc.) that has been produced at least in part by a professor of the URJC, is used in at least one course of a degree or master’s, or a doctoral course, taught at the URJC, and is distributed under an open publication license or free software license:

Do you need help?

If you need help to correctly label your works with the appropriate license, to choose a license, to understand if it’s interesting to publish your resources as OER, or what you need to do exactly to publish them, send us a message to ofilibre@urjc.es. We will try to help you as much as we can.