September 15th, 2016
We at bepress are pleased to announce the Teaching Commons, a discovery portal that brings together high-quality open education resources from leading colleges and universities and makes them available to educators and students around the world. Curated by librarians and their institutions and hosted by bepress, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia,
K-12 materials, and more.
According to the Hewlett Foundation, “open educational resources (OER) are high-quality, openly licensed, online educational materials that offer an extraordinary opportunity for people everywhere to share, use, and reuse knowledge.” OER have emerged in response to a number of factors in the educational landscape, including the rising cost of textbooks, the need for diverse teaching tools in the classroom, and the desire to better leverage digital resources to create global impact.
Built on bepress’s Digital Commons platform, the Teaching Commons provides a number of solutions for educators and institutions struggling with the problem of educational affordability. Educators can use the portal to discover teaching materials, adopt content for their courses, or create and share their own work. Authors can work with their libraries to easily publish and disseminate textbooks and other scholarly materials to a global audience.
The Teaching Commons also responds to the rapidly changing needs in the educational arena. Educators are looking for an increasing variety of resources in their teaching portfolio and Teaching Commons allows them to access materials such as traditional textbooks, lesson plans, videos, and even 3D files. Users can explore the site by subject area, type of work, and institution.
Materials in the Teaching Commons are aggregated from individual institutional repositories and are reviewed and vetted by librarians at top colleges and universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, City University of New York, and Trinity University. The site allows users to explore materials by type of content, subject, and institution. All materials are open access and openly licensed for use in classroom.
Founded by professors in 1999, bepress exists to help academic communities maximize the impact of their research and demonstrate their value. In addition to the growing suite that includes the Expert Gallery and SelectedWorks, bepress offers Digital Commons, the leading hosted institutional repository software platform that lets institutions manage, display, and publish scholarship in a beautiful, highly visible showcase. Over 450 institutions use bepress products to collect, preserve, and make visible the full range of their intellectual output.
