OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are learning and teaching materials that are freely available online for anyone to use. OERs can consist of full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, videos, tests, software and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge. Normally, small units of OER (eg animations, videos, podcasts, etc) are most attractive to educators from both the re-use and production angles, as they are easier to embed into existing classroom or online learning activities. Many teachers embed OER material into teaching sessions (eg classroom sessions, practical classes, workshops, seminars) and/or provide links to OERs via the VLE to enhance self-directed learning opportunities.
This is an attempt of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Central Library, JNU to collate several Open Access Resources spread all across the globe in a single page to provide easy and hassle free access to major educational resources to its users.
Open Educational Resources (OERs) in India
NPTEL, one of the earliest OER initiatives in the country, originated from the joint efforts of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 1999-2003.
The primary aim of this initiative is to “enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by providing easy access to curriculum-based video and web courses” in engineering and sciences, and a nominal fee is charged for certification programs.
Students are encouraged to participate in the courses provided by the NPTEL
SWAYAM is the official MOOC platform for India launched in early 2017. Professors/mentors of various premier institutions of India provide resource materials for online courses to the citizens of India.
At present, the SWAYAM platform hosts more than 300 free online courses categorized as scheduled courses and self-paced courses.
Many refresher courses are also provided through the SWAYAM platform.
e-PG Pathshala comprises good quality interactive content at Post Graduate level in various disciplines of social sciences, fine arts, humanities, mathematical sciences, linguistics and languages, etc.
There are more than 22,000 e-text and videos, from more than 5000 experts, with more than 30,000 quizzes in 70 subjects.
Students are encouraged to view the study materials for self-study purpose.
The Consortium for Educational Communication
Set up in 1993, by University Grants Commission (UGC) as one of its Inter-University Centre, Consortium for Educational Communication (CEC) provides an educational program (Audio/Visual and Web-Based) and related support material for a wide range of disciplines.
Four major components of this initiative include e-Education, EMRC (Media Center), VYAS and DTH Higher Education Channels and e-Knowledge Resources.
The Spoken Tutorial, was launched in 2010 as an NMEICT initiative by MHRD, Government of India, for ‘Talk to a Teacher’ activity. This project is developed and maintained by IIT Bombay.
It promotes the development and use of various open source software by providing more than 100 online tutorials in software development and programming through its website.
Virtual Labs is one of a kind initiative of NMEICT, MHRD, Govt. of India, Virtual Labs was launched in 2012 with an objective to “provide remote-access to Labs in various disciplines of Science and Engineering” for various education levels ranging from undergraduate, post-graduate as well as the research community.
Students can obtain multiple tools for learning, which include various “web-resources, video-lectures, animated demonstrations as well as self-evaluation”.
National Mission on Education through ICT launched FOSSEE in 2009.
There are more than 80 tutorials for different software by FOSSEE available via Spoken Tutorial.
The significant activities provided by this platform include textbook companion (port solved examples from standard textbooks using a free OSS), Lab Migration (from proprietary to open source), Self-Workshops, Conferences and Forums.
ShodhGanga is a platform developed by INFLIBNET Centre in 2014, for research scholars to assimilate their PhD theses and provide it publicly via open access.
There are approx. 206719 full-text theses available on ShodhGanga from 355 contributing universities.
VIDWAN is the premier database of profiles of scientists / researchers and other faculty members working at leading academic institutions and other R & D organisation involved in teaching and research in India. It provides important information about expert’s background, contact address, experience, scholarly publications, skills and accomplishments, researcher identity, etc. The database developed and maintained by Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET) with financial support from the National Mission on Education through ICT (NME-ICT). The database would be instrumental in selection of panels of experts for various committees, taskforce, established by the Ministries / Govt. establishments for monitoring and evaluation purposes.
The Quantum-Nano Centre is a multidisciplinary centre at Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra set up under MHRD National Mission on Education through ICT, with partners as IIT Kanpur, IIT Delhi and IIT Madras, besides several international collaborators. Read More
This project is an experiment to systematically design and develop learner-centric curricula, suitable for outcome-based learning for 4 year degree programmes in six major engineering disciplines. This project is NOT, yet another attempt to develop content, although each curriculum document is expected to include around 80 pages of course notes and 120-125 self assessment problems and solutions. Read More
National Digital Library of India (NDL India)
Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) under its National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) has initiated the National Digital Library of India (NDL India) pilot project to develop a framework of virtual repository of learning resources with a single-window search facility. Filtered and federated searching is employed to facilitate focused searching so that learners can find out the right resource with least effort and in minimum time. NDL India is designed to hold content of any language and provides interface support for leading Indian languages. It is being arranged to provide support for all academic levels including researchers and life-long learners, all disciplines, all popular form of access devices and differently-abled learners. It is being developed to help students to prepare for entrance and competitive examination, to enable people to learn and prepare from best practices from all over the world and to facilitate researchers to perform inter-linked exploration from multiple sources. The pilot project is devising a framework that is being scaled up with respect to content volume and diversity to serve all levels and disciplines of learners. It is being developed at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
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Welcome to eGyanKosh- a National Digital Repository to store, index, preserve, distribute and share the digital learning resources developed by the Open and Distance Learning Institutions in the country. Items in eGyanKosh are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved by IGNOU, unless otherwise indicated.
Parliament Digital Library provides information about various parliamentary documents of Lok Sabha, the House of People. The debates of Lok Sabha, from the First Lok Sabha to the Eighteenth Lok Sabha are placed in this portal. The Reports of several Parliamentary Committees, Presidential Addresses to Parliament, Budget Speeches, and several publications of the Lok Sabha Secretariat are also part of its collections. The treasured and historic legislative debates, tracing the growth and development of modern parliamentary institutions in India, from 1854 to 1952, thereby covering the period of 99 years, have also been digitized. The portal provides the users a single window information retrieval technology with filtered and federated search from multiple searchable resources.
Open Educational Resources (OERs) Initiatives from Abroad
DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, and is committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.
DOAJ is committed to keeping its services free of charge, including being indexed, and its data freely available.
DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.
OATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access
graduate theses and dissertations published around the world.
The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of
biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National
Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM)
Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks
Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them
online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on
older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of
volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for you to
enjoy.
Born out of Stanford University, HighWire is a trusted global provider of innovative scholarly publishing services. In 1995, we spearheaded the digital publishing revolution, working with Google to digitize and index academic journals.
Free web collections, books, journals, teaching materials, and other resources. This guide concentrates on English language collections, though some collections mentioned do have resources in several languages.
Since 1974, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has provided support to its member countries to make their research outputs visible and accessible through the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology (AGRIS); one of the most comprehensive search engines in food and agricultural scientific literature providing free access to millions of bibliographic records in 118 different languages.
From foundational science to new and novel research, discover our large collection of Physical Sciences and Engineering publications, covering a range of disciplines, from the theoretical to the applied.
We use rigorous methods, cutting-edge tools, and granular data on international development to answer the question: who is doing what, where, for whom, and to what effect?
The ILO Department of Statistics is the focal point to the United Nations on labour statistics. We develop international standards for better measurement of labour issues and enhanced international comparability; provide relevant, timely and comparable labour statistics; and help Member States develop and improve their labour statistics.
Open access (OA) is a key part of how Oxford University Press (OUP) supports our mission to achieve the widest possible dissemination of high-quality research. We publish rigorously peer-reviewed, world-leading, trusted open access research, upholding the highest standards of publication ethics and integrity.
Project Euclid provides a platform for independent and small publishers of mathematics and statistics to continue contributing vital scholarship in these disciplines in a cost-effective way. It hosts over 100 publications from around the world, including some of the most distinguished in their fields
The SpringerOpen portfolio has grown tremendously since its launch in 2010, so that we now offer researchers from all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences a place to publish open access in journals. Publishing with SpringerOpen makes your work freely available online for everyone, immediately upon publication, and our high-level peer-review and production processes guarantee the quality and reliability of the work. Open access books are published by our Springer imprint.
Explore Taylor & Francis’s full open access journals and platforms, where every new article is published gold open access.
edX offers online courses and programs that prepare you for every career moment
KAUST Library follows the recent trends in open access movements and established many read and publish agreements to manage hybrid journals publishing and institutional agreement to support gold only publishers.