Open Education Europa has compiled and is releasing today as open data the analytical list of European Repositories of Open Educational Resources (OER).
Open Education Europa: The European Hub for Innovation in Education from Open Education Europa
The Open Education Europa portal: a key player to improve visibility of high-quality European OER
The main goal of the Open Education Europa portal is to grant access to all existing high-quality European Open Educational Resources (OER) repositories in different languages in order to make them easily accessible for learners, teachers and researchers. The ultimate aim is to be able to foster the wide use and creation of OER in several languages, for all educational sectors and disciplines, and to help overcome the current fragmentation of European OER use.
What is an OER?
The Opening Up Education initiative, launched by the European Commission in September 2013, defined OER as “learning resources that are usable, adaptable to specific learning needs, and shareable freely”. The UNESCO definition goes further in detail when defining OERs as “educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them”. OERs are therefore teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost.
The European OER Repositories List
Our list has been compiled taking into account some considerations (see what we include below) and has now more than 100 European Repositories:
Our European OER repositories list can be downloaded here
The list will be reviewed and updated constantly. If you’d like to propose a nominate a repository to be added to the list, please send us the information using the form you can find in the OER repositories excel file.
What did we include?
- European OER Portals and Repositories
- Educational material repositories/directories
- Larger Repositories rather than very specific ones
- Focus on those who include Creative Commons license and on National/public OER repositories
- Focus on material for teachers (for the classroom/schools) rather than on higher education
- Collaborative OER production initiatives (LeMill, RVP.CZ Portal, Lektion.se, KlasCement”)
What did we NOT include as OER repositories in the OEE portal?
- Open access journal/publication sites (see OpenDOAR);
- Open course ware or MOOCs (see OEE sections on courses & MOOCs);
- Academic Repositories (articles, reports, thesis) and library repositories;
- National e-textbook initiatives;
- (Free) commercial digital resources (e.g. Pearson: OpenClass);
- Sets of content that are not under open licences (e.g. resources from media, such as the BBC);
- Free educational media from non-commercial providers (e.g. free education by Greek TV channel or the Times Educational Supplement website);
- ITunes U.
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