This page is constructed to build on the interest expressed during the All Staff Day, 2010. It is a "quick and dirty" listing of some links and sources that were mentioned in the course of the sessions I happened to attend. If anyone wants to see more included -- please let me know at shorton@ghc.edu.
One concise description of O.E.R is: "The World Wide Web presents an extraordinary opportunity for people and institutions everywhere to create, share, and use valuable educational materials. Open Educational Resources, as these free tools and content are called, can include full courses, textbooks, streaming videos, exams, software, and any other materials or techniques supporting learning." - The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Quite often, however, the term is assumed to specifically refer to on-line textbooks that are either free or inexpensive, and which can be freely modified by the instructor wishing to do so. That is a little too narrow, but with the costs of textbooks being a major problem at this time, it is not surprising!
We can help you locate materials on your discipline, and find if they have been reviewed, or the credentials of the authors.
In addition, the Spellman Library has purchased rights to thousands of magazines, journals, and reference materials, which can be used by you and your students without further charge. Although these are not truly O.E.R. (since they are copyrighted) other schools have shown ways this content can be used to decrease costs to the student, and actually increase educational quality at the same time.
Learning objects, in the widest definition, are anything that can be used for learning and teaching. Usually, the term is used to refer to digital materials (sample units on teaching X; short videos; sample assignments; etc.) shared over the internet.
Since locating these on the WWW is almost impossible because of the chaff that hides them, Learning Object Repositories have been created to make searches for L.O.'s easier to successfully conduct, since one can search a more tightly defined domain of documents and pages.
One problem that was mentioned is organization of the L.O.R. in Angel; if there is one thing librarians are good at - it's organizing a chaotic mass of documents into a coherent structure!
As reference librarians, we can help search any L.O.R. site using the fine art of keyword searching. That too, is what we do.