In the 2019-2020 academic year, more than 8 million students were enrolled in non-university regulated education in Spain. Meanwhile, there were 1.5 million university students. This is a large group that in times of pandemic needs to continue maintaining quality education, whether in the classroom or at a distance, to facilitate equal opportunities.

To achieve this objective, it is necessary to guarantee universal access to free and quality educational resources, the so-called OER (Open Educational Resources): teaching, learning or research materials published under an open licence that allows their reuse, adaptation and distribution for educational purposes.

UNESCO itself highlights how OERs "provides a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as improve policy dialogue, knowledge-sharing and capacity-building".

In our country, one of the main state-level sources of this type of resource is Procomún.

Procomún, a network of open educational resources and much more

Procomún was born as a result of the Plan for Digital Culture in Schools carried out in 2012 by the then called Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. This plan included among its lines of action the development of a "Procomún" space with open contents.

The idea was to promote a repository with educational resources of free access published by the Ministry and the Autonomous Communities. So that all the materials would follow a standard, a profile of application of common use metadata (LOM-ES) was developed, which would respond to the specific needs of the Spanish educational community. But Procomún is not only a repository, it is also a social network.

Procomún as a repository

Procomún currently houses 95,000 resources, and more than 100,000 multimedia elements. The website offers a search engine that allows users to filter by type of content, area of knowledge or educational context (ranging from infant education to university education without forgetting the materials aimed at teacher training). These contents are under an open Creative Commons licence, so users can not only access them for free and use them in the classroom, but they can also modify them to adapt them to the specific needs of their students. In this sense, teachers have a tool, eXelearning, which allows them to edit educational resources in a simple way. These new materials, in turn, can be incorporated into Procomún's catalogue and be used or transformed by other users. In this way the network is continuously enriched. Users have at their disposal a series of short tutorials in video format where they are explained how to publish or create content, among other aspects.

Procomún is also a semantic web, thanks to which it can connect with existing educational communities through the Linked Open Data Cloud.

Procomún as a social network

All of the above makes Procomún a meeting place, where ideas and experiences can be shared. The space currently has almost 40,000 users who have at their disposal functionalities such as social labelling, voting systems and recommendations for use. They also have more than 200 integrated communities that function as a space for consultation and learning.

Procomún is thus a web space that integrates learning objects and teaching experiences, constituting an intelligent, social and distributed network.

To know more, you can follow their twitter account.

The use of Procomún's resources during the COVID-19 pandemic

Access to this type of resource has been particularly important during the period of suspension of face-to-face classes. The REAs of procomún have served, together with other resources such as those of the Centre for Innovation and Development in Distance Education (CIDEAD), to launch the website https://aprendoencasa.educacion.es/ which sought to facilitate the continuity of educational activity thanks to access to different materials, tools and applications. This website offers useful resources for both teachers and families, including content aimed at parents who want to extend their children's education with leisure activities.

Procomún's resources have also been used in the programmes broadcast by TVE during the pandemic.

Other open educational resources

Procomún is not the only initiative of this type in our country. You can find many more in this document.  In addition, many Autonomous Communities also offer spaces where educational information can be channelled, ranging from regulations to resources and applications, as shown in the visual at the end of this article, from which you can access the different repositories available.

With the return to the classroom, it is important not to forget the existence of these open materials that can continue to enrich the education of students, whether in the classroom or in their own homes. These will soon be joined by the digital educational resources that will be developed within the framework of Educa en Digital, a programme in which all the Autonomous Communities will participate.