Open Educational Resources: Experiences at UNAM
Jorge León Martínez y Edith Tapia Rangel, CUAED-UNAM
jorge_leon@cuaed.unam.mx, edith_tapia@cuaed.unam.mx
Abstract
Educational resources are visual, verbal and multimedia representations offered by new
technologies to facilitate the study and understanding of such technologies. Due to their
characteristics, they have become fundamental in guaranteeing universal right of access to
education and learning throughout life. To achieve this purpose the National Autonomous
University of Mexico (UNAM) manages and develops several knowledge repositories of
educational resources which deal with different subjects and which are open to the public. This is
achieved by the Coordinación de Universidad Abierta y Educación a Distancia (CUAED) in
collaboration with over 50 academic dependencies from our University.
Keywords
Open Educational Resources, repositories, knowledge management, UNAM.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
At the end of the 90s was unleashed a global movement for creating open educational resources,
so prestigious international universities adhered to it, creating their own projects in different
languages. The importance of OER within the educational community has been manifested in the
numerous initiatives elaborated by UNESCO and other international non-government
organizations for guaranteeing access to education and learning throughout life.
Educational resources are visual, verbal and multimedia representations offered by new
technologies to facilitate the study and understanding of such technologies. The main roles that
educational resources serve are the following:
1.
Innovating the actual happening of education, which involves teachers, students and
content.
2.
Motivating students by diversifying teachers’ discourse.
3.
Mediation between the students and reality by the presentation and representation of
contents (both data and knowledge), which allows the student to structure their thought
and learning.
4.
Supporting the development of the students’ multiple cognitive actions.
5.
Coordinating and offering instructive actions for the teachers, as well as a methodological
guide for organizing students’ learning. (Gutiérrez 1997)
The main features of OERs are:
 Accessibility. The ease with which a resource can be found for its use at any place and
time.
 Reusability. A resource’s capability to be adapted and used in different learning contexts.
 Interoperability. The ease with which the resource can be implemented on different tools
and devices.
 Sustainability: The correct performance across updates, different software, etc.
 Metadata: The inclusion of descriptions that allow its indexation, storage, searching and
retrieval.
According to UNESCO, OER are “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that
reside in the public domain and have been released under an open license that permits access,
use, repurposing, reuse and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions” (Atkins,
Brown & Hammond, 2007). Therefore, OER can include complete courses or programs, course
materials, modules, student guides, teaching notes, textbooks, research articles, video,
assessment tools and exams, interactive materials (such as simulators, role-plays, databases)
software, apps —including mobile apps— and any other resources useful for education.
Likewise, educational resources pose great potential in improving the quality and effectiveness
of education by allowing three particular conditions:
1. An increased availability of high-quality relevant resources for learning, which reduces
costs of access to educational materials.
2. The ease of adaptation favored by the use of unrestrictive licenses promotes the
development of new ways in which students can become more active participants in their
own learning processes.
3. Teachers can develop more content as the creation of open educational resources allow
institutions to cut their production costs.
Knowledge Management
An important element in educational resources is knowledge, which may be defined as
“reasoning about information and data to actively allow a good performance, problem-solving,
decision-making, learning and teaching” (Beckman 1997).
The knowledge produced within each individual is referred to as “tacit knowledge”. This
knowledge when transferred into a physical support is known as “explicit knowledge”.
Nowadays, digital media provide the main support for explicit knowledge. Universities —as
producers of explicit knowledge— must have knowledge management systems of help for their
work as educators and divulgators of knowledge.
In this particular experience, the transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge is
based on a development methodology conceived by CUAED itself, which follows the next
stages:
 Defining the project’s profile. The profiles takes two aspects into account: on the one
hand, the administration or management of the project; on the other hand, the educational
model which will support the resource, the navigation levels represented in a navigation
diagram; the defining of an instructional script (which is a key instrument for everybody
involved in the development), the recuperation and explicit phrasing of the resource’s
general information.
 Content analysis. This is the stage where the teacher or content expert drafts a first
attempt in converting him tacit knowledge of the discipline into explicit knowledge in
presentations, notes and summaries.
 Pedagogical advice. The stage involves both the content expert and the pedagogical
advisors. The latter helps the expert in the process of converting implicit knowledge into
explicit knowledge by guiding him in the requirements for achieving the goal of the
resource in question.





Proof-reading. This stage is focused on revising the instructional script in terms of
spelling, grammar, and consistency with the proper language for the disciplinary area
with which the resource is dealing.
Visual communication. The stage deals with the drafting and design of all the illustrations
and interactive resources required in the instructional script.
Integration. This is the stage where content, activities, interactive resources and all other
designed elements are integrated into a single unit which will become the open
educational resource.
Piloting. This is an evaluation of the open educational resource with the aim of verifying
that the integration has been consistent with the instructional script.
Release. Once the content expert has approved the integration of the resource, it is placed
in an open-access repository.
In that sense, open resource repositories are useful in promoting and distributing knowledge that
supports learning. Resource repositories are considered knowledge repositories —one of the four
representative practices of knowledge management— since they are structured knowledge
databases distributed among a group of people for the exchange and compiling of valuable ideas
and experiences. Information technologies contribute greatly as support for the exchange of ideas
through the repository, but it is people the ones who actually play a key role in the success of any
repository (Cabrera y Rincón, 2001).
Repository of Open Educational Resources
Matking (2010) says that educational institutions have ten reasons to develop and maintain
repositories of open educational resources:
1.
To offer a public service adhered to the universities tradition of universality in education.
2.
To allow the display of institutional programs.
3.
To draw the interest of possible applicants.
4.
To share and reuse educational resources.
5.
To publish research conducted within the institution.
6.
To attract new sources of financing.
7.
To support current students’ learning.
8.
To train and develop the institution’s staff.
9.
To promote the use of educational resources from other institutions.
10.
To actively participate in the global community.
From that, UNAM manages and develops several knowledge repositories of educational
resources which deal with different subjects and which are open to the public. This is achieved
by the Coordinación de Universidad Abierta y Educación a Distancia (CUAED) in collaboration
with over 50 academic dependencies from our University. The following are some of our
repositories.
Media Campus (URL: http://mediacampus.cuaed.unam.mx)
Figura 1. Media Campus.
Media campus is a repository that provides teachers with the possibility of incorporating didactic
resources in multimedia format and share it with students, colleagues and any other person
interested in the subject. The site hosts over 3500 resources such as programs, interviews, and
video segments as well as 106 Learning Support Units (Unidades de Apoyo Para el Aprendizaje,
or UAPAS, in Spanish) in video format. UAPAS allow students to reach a specific learning
objective and can be accessed in any part of the world at any time. They feature the following
didactic structure:
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





Introduction. It prepares the student in the area or subject.
Contextualization. It provides basic information that allows students to relate their
previous knowledge and introduces or specifies the content that will be studied. It
features a link to start the subject and a definition of the concept or subject that will be
developed.
Content development. The design and presentation of content must resort to a series of
graphical and audiovisual resources to enable students to experience and assimilate the
content and find its meaning and orientation. Content design developed by content
experts and the pedagogical instructors implies a number of elements such as what
concepts and facts are essential, how they can be best presented, how deeply and to what
extent the learning goals should be dealt with, what aspects of learning should be favored,
among other concerns.
Summarizing. An organized revision of the aspect that has been presented during the
development of the UAPA.
Learning activity. This is a number of intentional, organized, and systematized activities
that allow students to bring their learning to concretion by means of specific actions that
are coherent with both the learning goal and the principles of sequencing, continuity and
integration.
Exit. Formal farewell from the UAPA (CUAED, 2011).
English Media (URL: http://www.cuaed.unam.mx/english_media/)
Figura 2. English Media.
This repository hosts open digital resources that help students to consolidate their learning of
English as a Foreign Language and to extend the practice and exposure to the target language by
independent study. These resources are called Thematic Units. They consist of graphics, texts,
audiovisuals and interactive elements and were designed by teachers from UNAM’s secondary
education institutions. Students who enter the site find resources for the autonomous learning of
English.
OpenCourseWare (OCW) (URL: http://www.cuaed.unam.mx/uapas/)
Figura 3. OpenCourseWare.
It is an open repository of knowledge which can be accessed through the website where several
UAPAs of a wide variety of subjects have been published. Each UAPA organizes the content, the
learning activities and self-evaluation units and the topics and sub-topics to develop in order to
reach the indicated learning goals. For that purposed, they are supported by text, graphics,
audiovisuals and interactive elements.
Math Media (URL: http://www.cuaed.unam.mx/math_media/#)
Figura 3. Math Media.
Math Media offers UAPAs that deal with different Math subjects that are reported as posing a
high difficulty for learning. Its goal is to support both learning in the classroom and self-learning
of Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Functions, Calculus, Statistics and Probability. In addition, the
site features a number of didactic strategies, bibliographical references, articles and other related
sites of interest for both teachers and students, as well as a calendar of academic events.
References
Atkins, D. E., Brown, J. S., & Hammond, A. L. (2007). A review of the open educational
resources (OER) movement: Achievements, challenges, and new opportunities (pp. 229-246).
Creative common.
Beckman, T. (1997). A Methodology for Knowledge Management. International Association of
Science and Technology for Development (AISTED) AI and Soft Computing Conference.
Banff, Canadá.
Cabrera A. & Rincón M. (2001). La Gestión Del Conocimiento: Creando Competitividad en La
Nueva Economía. Ice, Nueva Economía Y Empresa. Número 971. Abril-Mayo. Disponible
en: Http://Www.Revistasice.Com/Cmsrevistasice/Pdfs/Ice_791_7791__81b391c02044f7ca33709b8d02b0578c.Pdf. [Consultado: 09 Feb. 2012].
Coordinación de Universidad Abierta y Educación a Distancia (CUAED) (2011). Departamento
de Diseño Instruccional. Dirección de Proyectos y Vinculación. Unidades de Apoyo para el
Aprendizaje en video (UAPAS-V). Documento de trabajo.
Gutiérrez, A. (1997). Educación Multimedia y Nueva Tecnologías. Ediciones de la Torre,
Madrid, 1997. Pp. 95-131.
Kanwar, A., Uvalić-Trumbić, S., Butcher, N. (2011). A basic guide to open educational resources
(OER). Vancouver: Commonwealth of Learning; Paris: UNESCO.
Matkin, G. (2010). The Distance Education Opportunity for Institutional Leadership. Continuing
Higher Education Review. Vol. 74, 32-29.
Web pages cited
Recursos Educativos. http://recursos.cuaed.unam.mx/
Media Campus. http://mediacampus.cuaed.unam.mx
English Media. http://www.cuaed.unam.mx/english_media/
OpenCourseWare (OCW). http://www.cuaed.unam.mx/uapas/
Math Media. http://www.cuaed.unam.mx/math_media/#
License and Citation
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. Please cite this work as: León, J., Tapia, E. (2015).
Open Educational Resources: Experiences at UNAM. In Proceedings of Open Education Global
2015: Innovation and Entrepreneurship.