OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES: AN IMPETUS TO APPLICATIONS IN MATHEMATICS

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OER) have emerged as significant contributors to Education with the upcoming of Computers and arrival of Internet. The educational institutions around the entire world have undergone enormous developments with the emergence of OER. “OER refers to learning, teaching and research materials residing in public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others”. OER has contributed making learning more affordable, equitable and accessible. OER is invisibly promoting equal educational opportunities and thus evolving as a means of the accomplishment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). “Open Educational Resources in education includes Open Course-ware, Learning Modules, open Textbooks, Streaming Videos, Open Access Journals, online Tutorials, etc.” OER originates from diverse sources. While some are developed particularly by authors for education purpose, others are published commercially by publishers. In context with “Mathematics”, OER has been acting as key factor in gaining impetus in the teaching-learning-research applications in Mathematics in variable forms. OERs in Mathematics includes Online Repositories and Collections, Add-ons to Teachers, Open Mathematical Tools, Research tools for finding articles on mathematics in publications such as magazines, journals, and media. Moreover, there is multipurpose Mathematics Software which provide multiple other free software. “Sage Math” was developed as substitute for Maple and MATLAB. There are Open Textbook Collections such as Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER), Bookboon, Libretexts, Mathematics Commons, etc. OER has transformed teaching, learning and research in Mathematics to much affordable and freely accessible but at the same time there is continuous requirement of improvement and standardization of the texts available. The primary issue being investigated is how open educational resources (OERs) might promote the innovation of mathematical applications.