Welcome to Repository.ac.nz, a source for New Zealand's Open Educational Resources

This site is the result of a collaborative funded by New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission's Innovation Development Fund (eCDF) during 2006/2007.

What are Open Educational Resources?
The term Open Educational Resources (OER) was first adopted by UNESCO in 2002 and refers to educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses, to re-mix, improve and redistribute.

Presently the benefits of open source software in education are apparent and widely acknowledged. In New Zealand we have seen the benefits of open source applications such as Moodle. The philosophy behind open content is similar. The principle is that content can be improved upon and made freely available without standard copyright restrictions.

Reduction in the duplication of investment is our primary goal, but without risking the pluralism of ideas and innovation that underpin a vibrant education sector. Providing shared resources that can be used in a flexible way by different organisations meets both these objectives.

New Zealand Open Educational Resources Project
Funded by the Tertiary Education Commission, the objective of the project is to develop courseware that will be freely available to all tertiary education institutions in New Zealand.

All materials are being developed using a modular approach to best enable customisation, increase the potential for re-use, and lower the cost of maintenance.

To deliver the reference model or proof of concept, the project team is developing open educational resources in the following areas:

• NZIM Certificate in Management core papers
• Information and Communications Technology

Hardware Fundamentals 500 was created in consultation with the National Advisory Committee on Computing Qualifications (NACCQ).

Building and Construction
Three courses in the National Diploma in Construction Management for online / blended delivery

How to obtain and download the course materials.
The NZ OER project uses the Creative Commons SA 2.5 license meaning that anybody is free to access, modify and redistribute the resources.

We have adopted a strategy whereby courses can be viewed in a finished form at our Showcase area. You can also download these as Moodle back-ups.

Not everyone uses Moodle though. Each course has been built using a modular approach so they can be customised to suit different organisations, whether they are providing a distance learning course or blended learning for on or off-campus students. The aim is that all of the courseware can be easily re-edited, extended or re-designed by the organisation using it. All the course modules have been packaged as IMS Content Packages accessible from searching within this repository. All the source files are also available meaning that your own design teams can modify the materials including the Flash objects that use XML feeds.