Ulrich Schrader's Website

For the educator resources on the internet are often like a double sided sword. On one side they might be very successfully applied in the teaching process, on the other side the licensing is not often clearly expressed, or access to the resource might be restricted, or even prohibitively expensive. Here freely available open educational resources become increasingly more relevant - not only for the process of formal teaching and learning in institutions dedicated to this task, but more important for self-guided learning also in the context of professional development.

Here are a couple valuable things I came across during the last years.

Basic information

• Report: Open Educational Practices and Resources - introductory report, that gives a good overview
• Creative Commons for Dummies - a great explanation of an often used licensing scheme

Collections of freely available open media

• Recorded lectures - collection of portals to recorded lectures and academic talks
• iTunes U - iTunes University - offers online courses for your iPod or MP3 player
• Jimmy Ruska's: Top 10 Universities With Free online Courses
• Google Code University - not only a code repository but also a collection of online courses for programmers and computer scientists

How to find resources?

• LOLOL - Little Open Library of Online Learning - a collection of open access journal about eLearning, online or distance learning; quickly searchable using Google custom restricted to these journals
• LOLON - Little Open Library of Nursing - a collection of open access journal about nursing; quickly searchable using Google custom restricted to these journals
• Search universities for resources - how to restrict your search to academic institutions. Might not always lead to free and open resources
• PDF Books, Articles, and Documents Search Engine - restrict your search to PDF Documents on the web. Might not always lead to free and open resources

How to get notified about new freely available scientific articles?

• How to build your personalized open access journal (POAJ) of biomedical articles of your interest using RSS-feeds - for the health sciences. Limit your search to freely available articles and create your customized RSS-feed, informing you about new articles once they are in the National Library of Medicine (Pubmed)

I am an educator and researcher myself, so this is

• How and why do I share the content of my courses