I love the idea of Open Educational Resources, and the fact that they are so readily available to anyone with the internet. As a teacher, I find that I am constantly looking for animations, graphics, pictures and video that explain certain content, or music and sound effects to support my own multimedia creation. Being able to search sites like Flickr for material that has a creative commons license, or Khan Academy to find short videos explaining events from history makes my job easier. Instead of spending time focusing on creating the perfect piece of media for a lesson, I can instead use the (often much more polished) work that another educator has allowed me to share, and can worry instead about how best to present that material, how best to discuss it with my students, and how best to help them understand it.
I am lucky enough to work at a school that has considerable resources, and typically having access to high quality learning resources is not a challenge for us financially. That has led me to think about how the material that our teachers are creating could be shared in a way that would contribute to the OER universe. I have publicly posted videos that I have create to sites like youtube.com, but I know that these are hard for other creators to play with, modify or shape to their own needs. One thing I would like to consider for myself is finding (and using) alternative means of sharing my work with others, so that I can be an active contributor to the OER ecosystem, rather than just being a passive user.
I’ve been involved with several schemes to support sharing resources among educators but there have always been roadblocks. There is always a tension between having a site that holds shareable materials from all the educators in a school district, university or province vs. using existing platforms to store and share (e.g. with suitable tags in Flickr or YouTube). One of the most successful collections I’ve seen lately is around the use of the interactive media tool H5P for post-secondary in Ontario.