Cody Taylor: SPARC OER Leadership Program

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Sustaining an OER Initiative

The OER initiative of OU Libraries is entering its fifth year and up to this point it has only awarded individual instructors for adopting OER. One thing that we have realized is that these instructors do not teach the classes they received awards for every time those courses are offered. This is problematic given that the goal of the Libraries' initiative is to save students money. In order to maximize the award amounts offered by the Libraries it is important to us that the resources adopted as part of our program are used as frequently as possible. The project I have proposed as part of the SPARC Leadership Program is to attempt to convince the Mathematics department at my campus to switch from costly resources to OER to be used in the Calculus sequence. It would seem as if the textbook used in the Calculus sequence is decided at the department level. This is the type of structure that makes most sense to encourage the use of OER in given that each instructor does not deci

Open Pedagogy

In his blog post, What is Open Pedagogy, David Wiley claims that "there are much bigger victories to be won with openness" than cost savings alone. He goes on to compare using OER as a direct replacement for traditional textbooks to driving an airplane as one would a car. (Wiley) His point is that open educational resources enable a type of pedagogy prohibited by traditional textbooks and their accompanying teaching techniques. Related to cost savings is the digital nature of OER and that they can be distributed without the overhead costs associated with printing and shipping physical resources. Open educational resources have the potential to reach students, hobbyists, even professionals who might not be affiliated with an academic institution. These and those to follow are considerations to be made in the process of adopting open educational resources. OER enables innovative pedagogy beyond cost savings. Open pedagogy gives students the opportunity to demonstrate learni

Considerations for Creating OER

Before creating OER, first consider a few things. The specifics of open licenses vary but in general all OER are created in the spirit of reuse. As such, users of OER must be afforded two things in order to make full use of them. -they need the ability and the permission to exercise the 5 Rs. First, the 5 Rs themselves: Retain - the right to make, own, and control . . . Reuse - the right to use content . . . Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter . . . Remix - the right to . . . make something new Redistribute - the right to share copies . . . of OER. These points are addressed by the license applied to a work. The license should be of the "open" variety, Creative Commons licenses, and others such as the GNU Free Documentation License address the 5 Rs. Though these are common and practical, neither of these examples are as open as no license at all -putting your work in the Public Domain. Once applied and made of use, a license i

Open Content Definition: Permission to is not Ability to

Traditional educational resources differ from open educational resources in that open educational resources can and may be used in ways that traditional resources cannot. This might seem like a trivial point to make, but too often I feel as though part of this discussion is neglected. David Wiley laid out in the Open Content Definition the attributes that a work must possess in order to be considered "open". (Wiley) These attributes can be separated into two categories; permission to, and ability to exercise activities prohibited by traditional educational resources. Permission to The permission portion of the open content definition is made up of rights that everyone has regarding an open work. Those rights are commonly referred to as The 5Rs and they are as follows: Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the Content Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself

OER Skepticism

What follows are two questions from and two potential responses to someone who is skeptical about adopting and open educational resource. Anyone could have posted that information online. This question surprises me. I understand it as a reflex, but not as an argument that anyone would defend. It's true that OER can be written and published by anyone; however, it is also true that faculty members are experts in their domains and are ultimately responsible for ensuring that the information presented to their students is appropriate and factual. Regardless of an author's academic status or lack thereof their work has the potential to be useful; however, that's up to individual instructors to decide. Adopting OER requires effort on the part of instructors as it would if they were adopting a traditional textbook -perhaps more in order to tailor the OER to their class or make it more thorough. In exchange for their effort, students taking that class forevermore will not have t

Successful OER Model

As we read about in this week's readings and as many have reiterated in the discussion, one of the most difficult things to overcome when implementing OER initiatives is awareness of what OER are and instilling the confidence in instructors and departments that OER is a viable, sustainable, model with longevity. During the outset of an OER initiative I think that it is important to target instructors who might have been using OER (they might not be calling it OER) before the initiative was put in place. These are low-hanging-fruit. They might be rogue in that this individual "OER" pursuit does not have the explicit support of their department or college, therefore any support or encouragement at all from libraries or otherwise will likely go a long way towards their continued use of OER. Because these adopters will be distributed widely across campus, there will likely be no coherency across their efforts and supporting them will be difficult at scale. This early stage