The Significance of Open Educational Resources for Schools

        Creating open educational resources for schools is a dream for many educators, government policy makers and educational institutions. Creating open educational resources for schools offer the following advantages:

• Giving free access to high-quality educational resources to teachers and learners, regardless of their physical location
• Having high-quality educational resources that are collaborative produced, localized and adjusted to fit the individual learner's specific needs and context
• The cost of producing these high-quality educational resources is distributed across a large number of institutions and countries
• The maintenance of these high-quality educational resources would be declining rapidly and may even be considered negligible if the trend were to continue

        As of today these conditions of open educational resources for schools only exists in laboratory models. However, in the course of the next several years, it will become possible in ways that will radically affect how educators create and pass on knowledge and how learners absorb them.

        One element that will make this a reality is to provide an open access to educational resources wherein a concept of meta-university will emerge. In this setup, a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic and communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms will be created which will influence the construction or enhancement of higher education worldwide. Computers and the Internet will play a significant role since they will provide the communication infrastructure. Meanwhile, the calls for open access to educational resources for schools and its derivatives will also influence the creation of much of the knowledge and information infrastructure for open education.

        When we talk about initiatives to provide open educational resources for schools, its impact will be significant for learners, educators and educational institutions over the next number of years. These educational resources will have to be widely accessible for users all across the world at little or no cost to the learner.

Exploring Open Educational Resources for Schools

Open educational resources for schools refer to teaching and learning materials that are available through the Internet for everyone to use. There are open educational resources for schools that can be used by an instructors and students for an educational institution or even a self-learner. The examples of Open Educational Resources for schools are full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, coursework assignments, quizzes, laboratory and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many other resources that can be stored via digital media from sources all over the world.

Although informational content in its pure form covers a significant effect to learning and teaching, it will be helpful to consider open educational resources for schools depending on their levels of granularity and focus on the degree through which information content is embedded within a learning activity. This classification is as follows:

• Digital Assets. This normally consists of a single file such as an image, video or audio clip. This is sometimes called a 'raw media asset'.
• Information Objects. It is a structured aggregation of digital assets that is designed for the sole purpose of presenting information.
• Learning Objects. This is an aggregation of one or more digital assets that represents an educationally meaningful stand-alone unit.
• Learning Activities. These are tasks involving interactions with information that will help achieve a specific learning goal or objective.
• Learning Design. These are structured sequences of information and activities that aim to promote learning.

Open Educational Resources for schools has the aim of providing open access to education resources of high quality to anyone anywhere in the world. Based on the growing popularity of the Internet and the recognition by governments and academic institutions to the role of online and virtual environments in the advancement of learning, the number of programmes and projects associated with Open Educational Resources for schools will be expected to grow quickly over the years.