Cody Taylor: SPARC OER Leadership Program

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...

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 ...

The term "Open Educational Resources" or OER describe educational materials that include but are not limited to textbooks, videos, quizzes, articles, and websites that provide others the permission to exercise the "five Rs" of the Open Content Definition put forth by David Wiley. The five Rs themselves are ways in which OER can be used that separate them from traditional educational resources. The most trivial argument to be made in favor or OER is that they are free of cost. -freely accessible to everyone; all students and instructors regardless of geography. 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, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language) Remix - the right to combine the original or rev...