Students as OERs (Open Educational Resources) co-creators

Open educational resources (OERs) have been around for around 20 years and their use has not fully reached its true potential, according to education specialists. This paper presents the results of a study of creating Open Educational Resources together with students, with the purpose of reusing them in future iterations of Higher Education programs. The students have to become co-creators of learning content, as part of their year assignment in several Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM) programs, both at bachelor and master levels. Our study seeks to identify if creating original OERs as multimedia artifacts will facilitate students' understanding of open education principles and apply them in the future. We tested several approaches on how to realize this assignment, individual or in pairs, one OER per team or several OERs, and we applied connectivism theory as to validate our results. The results of our study indicate that by exposing students to open education, encouraging them to become OER co-creators and allowing them to connect in multiple ways, improves their digital lifelong learning abilities and inspires them to use open education principles or resources in their quest for knowledge.