Bepress is thrilled to announce the Teaching Commons, a new discovery portal of open educational resources. This portal includes everything from open access textbooks, syllabi, course sites, videos of lectures, and even K-12 curricula! We hope this resource will directly support your conversations around OER.
It’s clear that educators are looking for new ways to publish, share, and author these materials. Driving factors include rising textbook costs and the desire to explore digital innovation in the classroom. The Teaching Commons is an outlet for faculty who are producing materials as well as for those readers who are looking to adapt materials created by others.
One of the biggest barriers to using open educational resources is the difficulty in locating high quality content. Curated by librarians from schools across the Digital Commons community, we hope the portal will address this challenge by making it easy to create, discover and share teaching materials.
The Teaching Commons includes everything from MOOCs and images to teaching tools such as videos—take a look at this database of Mineral Samples featuring a 3D video collection from the University of Dayton and the Biochemistry Lecture Videos from Utah State University. And, of course, textbooks are a great fit for Digital Commons repositories; this interactive itext on Cell and Molecular Biology from University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee is just one example.
For more in-depth research on OER and strategies for faculty engagement, see the recent bepress webinar “Expanding the Classroom with Open Educational Resources.” Danielle Maestretti and Michelle Barron-Lutzross of bepress Consulting Services discuss ways to integrate OER into the institutional repository, a strategy that allows libraries to play a pivotal role in the success of OER on campus.
We’ve found a majority of the educational materials out there, but if you have items that you think would be a great fit, let us know and we’ll make sure they get considered for inclusion. This is a new endeavor, so we are eager to hear your feedback at outreach@bepress.com!
