“Free is good” (Bethany Ray) – a recent Edutopia article – provides a nice explanation of OER (open educational resources) for the novice. The explanation argues the benefits of OER in contrast to commercial materials and suggests OER provides educators a way to find resources for individual student needs. Of course, the challenge with OER is finding the resources and the article does a nice job of identifying repositories that can be searched.
A brief plug for my own work – I argue that online content and learning resources are not the same thing (see series beginning with this post). Layering services (examples are explained in the series) enable educators to function as instructional designers and add components to information rich content to guide and support student learning.