Fire Science and Safety: OER

"7 Things You Should Know About Open Educational Resources"

An Open Educational Resources Policy Development
Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials

"Given the potential of OER to improve higher education systems, UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) have developed these Guidelines, after broad consultations with stakeholders in all regions of the world, to support governments, higher education institutions/providers, academic staff, student bodies and quality assurance/accreditation and recognition bodies."

An online course from The Open University

"Welcome to the world of Open Educational Resources (OER). This handbook is designed to help educators find, use, develop and share OER to enhance their effectiveness online and in the classroom."

Online journal of open distance and e-learning.

"...features the open source Pressbook platform for adapting or authoring open textbooks."

Paper from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

From Lumen Learning -- check the calculator to see how OER can increase student success!

The Advanced Fire Weather Forecasters Distance Learning Course addresses advanced training needs of Incident Meteorologists (IMETs), Fire Weather Program Leaders (FWPLs) in NOAA's NWS weather forecast offices (WFOs), and Regional Program Managers. These individuals are responsible for maintaining local fire weather programs and supporting all-hazards incidents on site including wildfires, hazardous material releases, and incidents of national significance.

Fire and Emergency Services Higher Education (FESHE) leaders have produced, through consensus, a standardized undergraduate curriculum that is national in scope, content and outcomes. All the courses share student learning outcomes, catalog descriptions, outlines and text recommendations that provide a national core of knowledge and competencies. These course outlines share common content through FESHE’s partnership with textbook publishers who write textbooks and faculty supplements that support them.

This curriculum is designed to teach the basics of fire to non-fire-professional community members, including instructors and landowners, such as ranchers and farmers. The goal is to reduce risk and fire hazard through education and understanding. This curriculum is divided into six parts: an introduction and five modules. Readers can download the entire 197-page curriculum as a single PDF or they can access individual sections.

FIREDOC is an online bibliographic database that contains a large collection of building and fire research materials from many sources. The database reflects the 80,000 holdings (published reports, journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and audio/visual items) that have been collected by the Engineering Laboratory's Research Information Service.

This module is designed to provide students with the understanding of fire, fire dynamics, and fire behavior so that they can read a fire scene and build a claim for the fire’s location of origin and cause.

The Fire Research Institute (FRI) is a not-for-profit library holding around 166K books, journal articles, videos, training manuals, dissertations, news reports, and other material on wildland fire.

The goal of the FRAMES (Fire Research and Management Exchange System) Resource Catalog is to be a comprehensive source of information about wildland fire-related resources, targeted to wildland fire and other natural resource professionals. The search box below accesses more than 21,500 records from the FRAMES Resource Catalog, and the Tall Timbers E.V. Komarek Fire Ecology Database provides nearly 33,000 additional resources.

The MERLOT Fire Safety Portal is an educational resource for teaching and learning. Use this portal to discover online learning materials, MERLOT members, journals, professional organizations, and news in the area of fire science.

This link will lead you to over 150 resources for community college-level fire science classes, including assignments, articles, lesson plans, and text-books.

The US Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program has created a free and open online library called SkillsCommons containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. The Open Educational Resources (OER) are produced by community colleges across the nation and can be found, reused, revised, retained, redistributed and remixed by individuals, institutions, and industry.

"Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools."

Free online workshop.