The UK-based JISC OER initiative is funding and creating many great open educational resources and guides for users and creators of OERs. This particular guide is aimed at creators of OERs from the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics domains, though contains advice that is likely useful to all sorts of OER authors.

Passed on to us by its creator, John Wetzel, the WikiPremed MCAT course is a “donationware” site (open access but does ask for a donation if you find yourself replying on it heavily) to help students prepare for the MCAT test.

Helpful post by Michael Paskevicius that lists a number of specialized image search engines that will help you find free and openly licensed images for use in your teachind and learning

In a wonderful demonstration of ‘walking the talk,’ Dr. Charles Severance of the University of Michigan remixed an existing open textbook, <a href=”http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html”>Think Python: How to Think like a Computer Scientist</a>, in only 11 days to produce a new textbook for his class, ones students could print out for $10 using a local print-on-demand kiosk on campus.

Google has released code and curriculum in partnership with a number of US universities in the hopes of bringing contemporary coding practices into more university computer science curriculum. The materials are available for free under a Creative Commons license.

If you are thinking about trying to get “openness” started at your institution, the students in David Wiley’s grad course, “IPT 692R: Open Education Policy Seminar” have done you a HUGE favour by compiling these Open Access and OER Policy Reviews. They have surveyed many of the leading institutions and identified salient aspects of their policies for others to learn from or emulate, a huge time saver when considering the policy complexities that can be involved with starting a formal project on campus.

Those interested in starting an OER project on their own campus may be interested in the new OER Toolkit developed on behalf of UNESCO to be a startup guide for participating in the international open education commons. Lots of good tips and information for the OER change agent here.

Cable Green, eLearning Director for Washington State’s Community College System, points to this useful summary of current Open Textbook initiatives in the US, a movement that is steadily gaining traction as textbooks increase in price and cost becomes an even bigger challenge to prospective students.

(see also Cable’s link to a recent survey on “Faculty Attitudes to Affordable and Open Textbooks.”)

Doug Holton, an instructor in the Instructional Tech and Learning department at Utah State Uinversity, has compiled a useful post pointing to freely available books concerning Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Education. These aren’t *textbooks* but instead free resources pointing to the future of education in these areas.

Via the blog comes this fantastic story:

What a great idea! DeAnza College has a community service learning project that involves developing open educational resources. They suggest several projects that students can contribute to…

I really like that the projects they’ve selected are all ones that can easily be contributed to by an average person. More courses should do something like this (like the open dictionary). I think it’s an incredibly valuable way to get immersed quickly in OER (and more immediately valuable than designing yet another new OER project — there are plenty already out there that need our help!)