OER Commons Green: Aggregating Best-in-Class Green Open Educational Resources

The project 'OER Commons Green' was initiated in 2010 and has the aim to build up and support an open knowledge base for educational resource on environmental topics like climate change or pollution. The initiative is supported by the Greek research-oriented SME Agro-Know Technologies and the American ISKME (Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education). With around 40498 resources OER Commons covers a lot of material type and categories which can be browsed individually.

The tool supports teachers with the provision of a wide range of open licensed environmental resources (Creative Commons), a rating and reviewing function, the possibility to create, share and download resources and the alignment of resources to Common core curriculum standards. Learners can benefit from international environmental collections, advanced search option and tag clouds as well as the possibility to give feedback through social bookmarking, tagging, rating and reviewing contents.

Due to the high number of visitors (>30,000 per month) the published contents have a high visibility. Furthermore publishers get a feedback to their uploaded contents through a clear curation policy and quality assurance process by education and metadata experts.