As student and also teaching I’ve used hundreds of OER. It’s extremely common today to share resources online, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to find a good book in Computer Science, because technologies change so fast that it’s not worthy to write a book.

Furthermore, as a teacher or “producer” of content, I’ve used some interesting tools:

exeLearning: A tool that lets you write in an easy word-processor way and publish to a lot of standard formats, like IMS, SCORM, html, epub, etc.

R-bookdown: is a format that lets you to produce documentation (html, epub) with graphics and statistics generated with R. It’s commonly used in data science and statistics. You can host your documentation by yourself or publish it in bookdown.org

Python Jupyter notebook: the same idea of r-bookdown but with python language. It’s interactive, as it lets you to execute python code inside the document.

OBS: I use it for my recordings

Adobe Presenter Video Express: an easy-peasy software to record, edit and publish your video edupills.

Advantages and drawbacks

On the other hand, there are some advantages and disadvantages on OER that needs to be taken into account.

Open access: An advantage for students is that sharing means that everybody can access to the materials and learn freely.

Reuse: Another advantage for teachers is that materials can be reused and updated by teachers or a community.

Don’t repeat yourself: The 3rd advantage for teachers is that there’s no need to repeat the work of making materials if you can use them freely, so you can expend your time in other tasks.

Need of a community: It’s not worthy if there are only a few producers of content. One person have no time to keep updated many materials. There should be a community.

Teachers value: We have to put in value the role of the teacher. e-learning is not for everybody, as it needs a high level of autonomy.