OER Introduction Booklet (Development Gateway Foundation)

• OER Introduction Booklet and Free Webinars (Homepage)
• OER Introduction Booklet - Version BETA (PDF)
• Development Gateway Portal

WHAT?
The Development Gateway Open Educational Resources (OER) dgCommunity drives a Community Awareness & Sensitization project focusing on the use of Open Education Resources in Developing Countries. In this context they have just released a FREE OER Introduction Booklet (CreativeCommons Attribution 3.0) and are planning to offer free Webinars introducing the concept of Open Educational Resources and its potential to serve Education and Development programmes and practitioners ...more

MASTERMIND?
Thomas Bekkers (Author of the OER Introduction Booklet)

JUICE?
Can you imagine paying for an OER Introduction Booklet (Now that would be really funny!). "The Booklet and the Webinar both provide a/an:

• Definition of Open Educational Resources
• Introduction to Open licenses and Standards
• Introduction to the Production and Distribution of OER
• List of OER content repositories, search engines and projects.

This project directly serves the OER dgCommunity main objective, which is to sensitize Development practitioners and citizens to Open Educational Resources, for the benefit of all. The Booklet and the Webinar are also to be considered as gateways for beginners to major OER projects, content repositories and search engines. An important part of its content introduces third part initiatives and portals in the domain of Open Education. Please feel free to use and remix widely the BETA version of the Booklet and subscribe for Webinars by visiting resources associated to this highlight (Source)."

First, thanks Joseph Hart for alerting me (or us) about this important OER introduction booklet. Secondly, in addition to reading this booklet, you can find an amazing amount of juicy OER stuff (e.g. training materials) on the portal itself. Though, if you are simply looking for new OER repositories, this booklet includes many excellent links (URLs) in an organized manner with short descriptions for each OER. Looking at my blog, I believe I will soon need to reorganize all my OER links to make them more useful and easier-to-access, too (Thanks for reminding me indirectly!).

Finally, I just can't understand why the dgCommunities site (or the whole Development Gateway Portal) makes it so difficult for us to extract content from it (OER?). They should make it easier for us (we want to spread the news without wasting time!) to easily copy/paste and remix content from the site (No need to retype something that is already there and makes sense!). I am not sure if its the site policy, or perhaps the IT geeks (site administrators) are just having some fun. Actually, we can easily use a few tricks to bypass this hassle (secret!), so why bother (Just make it easy, alright!). Thomas Bekkers, if you should ever read this post, could you please tell them to make it easier for us to copy/paste from the site. Finally, Thomas Bekkers congratulations and thanks for all your great work, contributions and efforts to construct the booklet and share OER related resources on the site. Great work! :)