Promoting the Creation, Share and Use of OERs through Open Repositories and Social Networks

Open educational resources have been the promise of providing people with high quality learning resources. Initiatives such as MIT OpenCourseWare, MERLOT and others have shown the real possibilities of creating and sharing knowledge through Internet. We indeed live in an age of content abundance, and content can be considered as infrastructure for building adaptive and personalized learning paths, promoting both formal and informal learning. Nevertheless, although most educational institutions are adopting a more open approach, publishing huge amounts of open educational resources, the reality is that these resources are barely used in other educational contexts. This paradox can be partly explained by the difficulties in adapting such resources to local educational contexts. Furthermore, if we want our learners to use and take advantage of learning object repositories, we need to provide them with additional services than just browsing and searching for resources. Social networks can be a first step towards creating an open social community of learning around a topic or a subject.