What Are Open Educational Resources?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely available, online learning materials that anyone can use to gain skills and knowledge. We publish data and lessons used in our classes and workshops online on the earthdatascience.org learning portal to allow users around the world to gain and teach technical earth data science skills. For learners, free online lessons lower the barriers to developing new skills, particularly if programs that teach those skills are not available to them. For educators, sharing open resources makes teaching more efficient as they can easily reuse materials and teaching datasets.
Open Education Textbooks, Courses and Lessons At Your Fingertips
Materials on the earth data science learning portal including open online textbooks, full courses, and individual lessons. Learners can work through all lessons on their own time and at their own pace. Lessons cover a suite of topics - a few examples are below:
If You Build It, They Don’t Just Come - Search Engine Optimization
Publishing online lessons is not always enough to make them easily found. Our lessons are search-engine optimized to make them easier to find through search engines. Search engine optimization includes adding keywords to headings to ensure visibility in search engines, optimizing metadata for each lesson page and creating content in areas where there are gaps online. To improve the website, we use Google Analytics to assess use of materials and to better understand our audience.
Our earthdatascience.org learning portal sees over 200,000 unique monthly users. This plot shows user base growth from 2018 to 2021.
