what is an open educational resource course

by Prof. Jonas Jacobi II 10 min read

Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.” In other words, “OER” is a very broad term. We apply it towards anything that helps students master course concepts.

Definition of Open Educational Resources (OER)
OER can include textbooks, course materials and full courses, modules, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

Full Answer

What is OER or open educational resources?

The Open Course Library, from Washington State University, is a collection of expertly developed educational materials – including textbooks, syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments – for 81 high-enrollment college courses. 42 courses have been completed so far, providing faculty with a high-quality, affordable option that will cost students no more than $30 …

What do we mean by open education?

Jan 10, 2022 · Section 67423 of the California Education Code defines Open Educational Resources (OER) as "high-quality teaching, learning and research resources that: Reside in the public domain or Have been released under an intellectual property license, such as the Creative Commons license, that permits their free use and repurposing by others, and

What are open educational resources (OER)?

Apr 05, 2015 · Open educational resources cover a wide range of online formats, including online textbooks, video recorded lectures, YouTube clips, web-based textual materials designed for independent study, animations and simulations, digital diagrams and graphics, some MOOCs, or even assessment materials such as tests with automated answers.

What are the best resources for teachers?

Mar 09, 2017 · Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge” [1] The list includes: Open courses Open Textbooks and curricula Open services and platforms Open media materials E-books

What does free open educational resources are required for this course?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are free digital learning materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that allows for free use and repurposing by others. OER can include: Textbooks. Lesson plans.Mar 16, 2022

What is the purpose of open educational resources?

OERs provide: Learning resources with cost-saving, quality and flexibility of access. Enhanced opportunities for self-learning at home. Skills development: digital literacy skills for searching, reusing, recreating, disseminating, branding, networking,...Apr 7, 2022

What is the meaning of open education?

Open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge. Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources, and they work to eliminate barriers to this goal.

How do you identify open educational resources?

These databases are a good starting point to find a wide variety of open educational resources.Open Textbook Library. ... OASIS. ... Mason OER Metafinder. ... OER Commons. ... BCCampus. ... Teaching Commons. ... HathiTrust Digital Library. ... Merlot.More items...

What are the disadvantages of OER?

Disadvantages of OERs include:Quality issues. ... Lack of human interaction between teachers and students. ... Language and/or cultural barriers. ... Technological issues. ... Intellectual property/copyright concerns. ... Sustainability issues.

What are the three major components of open educational resources?

What is an OER?Openly-licensed: You can read about this more in the Copyright & Licensing chapter.Freely Available: The resources must be freely available online with no fee to access. ... Modifiable: The resource must be made available under an open license that allows for editing.

What is the difference between distance education and open education?

Distance education refers to all forms of education which take place through communication means like online learning or correspondence, for which you don't have to be present in a particular location for classes whereas Open education usually refers to education which is available to anyone, regardless of student ...

What is open education in DepEd?

DepEd Open Educational Resources– is an online platform for public school teachers to support distance learning modalities that can be accessed to continue the delivery of basic education to our children.Apr 19, 2021

What are examples of OERS?

Open Textbooks. Open Textbooks. "Open textbooks are typically authored by faculty and published on the web with the support of universities or new commercial companies. ... Streaming Videos. Streaming Video. ... Open Access Journals. Open Access Journals. ... Online Tutorials. Online Tutorials.Oct 4, 2021

How many types of open educational resources are there?

3 Types of OER (and where to find them) There are a multitude of OER out there to choose from, including textbooks, courses, multimedia, data, and supplementary materials.

How is OER used in the classroom?

Openly licensed learning materials are easy to find and access, encouraging more independent and flexible learning opportunities for students. OER courses allow students to explore materials before enrolling, making them better prepared before they arrive in the classroom.Sep 13, 2016

What are open educational resources?

Open educational resources include, but are not limited to, full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.".

What is an open resource?

Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”. In other words, “OER” is a very broad term. We apply it towards anything that helps students master course concepts.

What is an OER?

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provides the following definition of open educational resources: “OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

What is open content?

Open content is licensed in a way that grants users the permission to: Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage) Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video) Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, ...

What is OER licensing?

OER resources reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Creative Commons Licensing is the most commonly used intellectual property license for OER that permits free use and re-purposing.

What is open educational practices?

Open educational practices are defined as, for example, "a set of activities around instructional design and implementation of events and processes intended to support learning. They also include the creation, use and repurposing of Open Educational Resources (OER) and their adaptation to the contextual setting.

What is OER in education?

OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licences". (This is the definition cited by Wikipedia's sister project, Wikiversity .) By way of comparison, the Commonwealth of Learning "has adopted the widest definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) ...

What is OER policy?

OER policies (also sometimes known as laws, regulations, strategies, guidelines, principles or tenets) are adopted by governments, institutions or organisations in support of the creation and use of open content, specifically open educational resources (OER), and related open educational practices.

What are the benefits of OER?

One of the most frequently cited benefits of OER is their potential to reduce costs. While OER seem well placed to bring down total expenditures, they are not cost-free. New OER can be assembled or simply reused or repurposed from existing open resources. This is a primary strength of OER and, as such, can produce major cost savings. OER need not be created from scratch. On the other hand, there are some costs in the assembly and adaptation process. And some OER must be created and produced originally at some time. While OER must be hosted and disseminated, and some require funding, OER development can take different routes, such as creation, adoption, adaptation and curation.

What is an OER?

The term OER describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve and redistribute under some licenses. The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm.

What is the OER logo?

UNESCO Global Open Educational Resources Logo. Open educational resources ( OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes.

Where is the OER conference held?

OER Conference – Held annually in Europe. OE Global Conference – Run by Open Education Global, OE Global conference is held annually in a variety of locations across the world. Creative Commons Global Summit – Creative Commons hosts its global summit annually and one of the main topics is Open Education and OER.

What are open educational resources?

Open educational resources cover a wide range of online formats, including online textbooks, video recorded lectures, YouTube clips, web-based textual materials designed for independent study, animations and simulations, digital diagrams and graphics, some MOOCs, or even assessment materials such as tests with automated answers.

How to teach OER?

There are therefore several choices: 1 take OER selectively from elsewhere, and incorporate or adapt them into your own courses; 2 create your own digital resources for your own teaching, and make them available to others (see for instance Creating OER and Combining Licenses from Florida State University); 3 build a course around OER, where students have to find content to solve problems, write reports or do research on a topic (see the scenario at the beginning of this chapter); 4 take a whole course from OERu, then build student activities and assessment and provide learner support for the course.

What is the idea of author license?

This does not take away someone’s copyright, but enables that copyright holder to give permission automatically for different kinds of use of their material without charge or any bureaucracy.

What is re-mixing in education?

re-mix: People can take two or more existing resources and combine them to create a new resource (for example, take audio lectures from one course and combine them with slides from another course to create a new derivative work);

What is re-use in a work?

re-use: The most basic level of openness. People are allowed to use all or part of the work for their own purposes (for example, download an educational video to watch at a later time); re-distribute: People can share the work with others (for example, send a digital article by-email to a colleague); revise: People can adapt, modify, translate, ...

Can OER include PowerPoint slides?

OER can also include Powerpoint slides or pdf files of lecture notes. In order to be open educational resources, though, they must be freely available for at least educational use.

Is EdX open source?

The edX MOOC platform is open source, which means other institutions can adopt or adapt the portal software, but institutions even on edX tend to retain copyright. However, there are exceptions on both platforms: a few MOOCs do have an open licence. There is also the issue of the context-free nature of OER.

What is the open education movement?

The open education movement was originally inspired by the open source community, with a focus on broadening access to information through the use of free, open content. As Bliss and Smith explain in their breakdown of the history of open education:

What courses are OER funded for?

Because of this, most of the OER available today are for general education courses such as Psychology, Biology, and Calculus.

What is an OER?

Open educational resources. (OER) are openly-licensed, freely available educational materials that can be modified and redistributed by users. They can include any type of educational resource, from syllabi to full courses. Openly-licensed: You can read about this more in the Copyright & Licensing chapter.

Is OER a drawback?

Although the other challenges to OER use are inherent to the resources themselves, this final drawback is a concern for you as a user and creator . It takes time and effort to find OER that might work for your course, and if you want to create and publish new resources, that takes exponentially more time.

Is OER good for classrooms?

There are many benefits to using OER in the classroom; however, there are also some drawbacks. The biggest challenge that instructors face when adopting OER is best encapsulated by the phrase “availability may vary.”

Can an instructor use OER?

Although cost savings are a major talking point in favor of adopting open educational resources, instructors can utilize OER effectively without replacing paid resources at all. [10] In fact, the freedom to adapt OER to instructional needs is often the most attractive aspect of OER. Since OER are openly licensed, educators are free to edit, reorder, and remix OER materials in many ways.

Is it free to access a library?

Yes. Maybe. Note: Although some materials are free to access for a library’s users, that does not mean that they are free to access for everyone (including the library). Similarly, while some open access resources are made available under a copyright license that enables modification, this is not always the case.

What is open education?

Open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge. Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources, and they work to eliminate barriers to this goal. Such barriers might include high monetary costs, ...

Why are open educational resources important?

Open educational resources are most useful when educators distribute them in open formats, so teachers and students can use those resources regardless of the particular technical platforms their schools have adopted. Projects like the OER Commons act as repositories for high-quality open educational resources.

What is the most basic characteristic of open education?

Promoting collaboration is central to open education. As the Open Education Consortium says: "sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: education is sharing knowledge, insights and information with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, ideas and understanding can be built.".

Can researchers access materials?

Consequently, scientists and other university researchers cannot access the materials they need— to learn about new developments in their fields, or to read, replicate, and verify others' findings. Dissatisfaction with limitations on access to research has spurred various " open access " movements in higher education.

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities.

The 5R Activities of OER

An open license permits users of a resource to participate in the 5R activities of OER:

Introduction to OER

The first of 5 OER tutorials by CCCOER, the video below discusses making the case for OER – including student, faculty, and institutional benefits – and understanding the basic rights that an open license provides.

What is open learning?

It’s a movement called open learning that enables students to have greater control over what they learn, where, and when.

How does open learning help students?

Open learning is helping democratize education, by making it more affordable, accessible, and attainable to students, no matter their location or income level. It also helps students explore new industries before investing in an often costly, more formal education.

What is MOOCs in education?

Open courses are what most people typically think about when they hear “open learning”—particularly massive open online courses (MOOCs). As opposed to traditional online models, MOOCs are free and available to anyone with an internet connection. Six years ago, when MOOCs were at their height, enrollments could exceed 230,000, although the typical class size averaged 25,000 students. Only 15 percent typically completed their courses, however, causing many to question MOOCs’ effectiveness.

Is affordability a barrier to access to higher education?

As tuition costs continue to climb, affordability is becoming a bigger barrier to access in higher education.

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Overview

Definition and scope

The idea of open educational resources (OER) has numerous working definitions. The term was first coined at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware and designates:
"Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by …

History

The term "learning object" was coined in 1994 by Wayne Hodgins and quickly gained currency among educators and instructional designers, popularizing the idea that digital materials can be designed to allow easy reuse in a wide range of teaching and learning situations.
The OER movement originated from developments in open and distance learning (ODL) and in the wider context of a culture of open knowledge, open source, free sharing and peer collaboration, w…

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages of using OER include:
• Expanded access to learning – can be accessed anywhere at any time
• Ability to modify course materials – can be narrowed down to topics that are relevant to course
• Enhancement of course material – texts, images and videos can be used to support different approaches to learning

Licensing and types

Open educational resources often involve issues relating to intellectual property rights. Traditional educational materials, such as textbooks, are protected under conventional copyright terms. However, alternative and more flexible licensing options have become available as a result of the work of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that provides ready-made licensing agreements that ar…

OER policy

OER policies (also sometimes known as laws, regulations, strategies, guidelines, principles or tenets) are adopted by governments, institutions or organisations in support of the creation and use of open content, specifically open educational resources, and related open educational practices.

Research

The growing movement of OER has also fostered research activities on OER across the world. Generally, research on OER is categorized into four categories, called COUP Framework, based on the focus of research:
Cost: the impact of OER adoption on cost reduction Outcomes: the impact of OER adoption/use on student learning Usage: the impact of and practices around customization of OER Perception…

Open educational practices

OER have been used in educational contexts in a variety of ways, and researchers and practitioners have proposed different names for such practices. According to Wiley & Hilton (2018), the two popular terms used are "open pedagogy" and "open educational practices". What these two terms refer to is closely related to each other, often indistinguishable. For example, Weller (2013) defines open pedagogy as follows: "Open pedagogy makes use of this abundant, o…

Background

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The open education movement was originally inspired by the open source community, with a focus on broadening access to information through the use of free, open content. As Bliss and Smith explain in their breakdown of the history of open education: Following the rise of open education in the early 2000s, growing i…
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What Is An OER?

  • (OER) are openly-licensed, freely available educational materials that can be modified and redistributed by users. They can include any type of educational resource, from syllabi to full courses. 1. Openly-licensed: You can read about this more in the Copyright & Licensingchapter. 2. Freely Available: The resources must be freely available online w...
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What Is Not An OER?

  • If a resource is not free or openly licensed, it cannot be described as an OER. For example, most materials accessed through your library’s subscriptions cannot be altered, remixed, or redistributed. These materials require special permission to use and therefore cannot be considered “open.” Table 1below explains the difference between OER and other resources ofte…
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Benefits of Using OER

  • Attribution: “AIM Highlight Reel” by San Fransisco State University [Youtube]is available under a Standard Youtube License.
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Challenges of Using OER

  • There are many benefits to using OER in the classroom; however, there are also some drawbacks. The biggest challenge that instructors face when adopting OER is best encapsulated by the phrase “availability may vary.”
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