Skip to main content

An Introduction to OER

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 revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup) Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend) The five Rs grant users permissions, but the benefits of OER aside from the absence of price, are entirely dependent upon the ability of a user to exercise those permissions. That is to say, the permission to exercise the five Rs is meaningless, unless a user possesses the ability to exercise those permissions. In short, "Poor Technical Choices Make Open Content Less Open." This point is detailed in the Open Content Definition. Humorous examples of this point were recently collected when proposed the following in a Tweet.
PDFs are notoriously difficult to modify, yet they are (anecdotally) the most common format in which OER are distributed which as I see it is not true to all of the five Rs. Some who replied to Wiley's Tween likened it to providing someone cake ingredients in the form of a baked cake and putting a "we're open" sign on a locked door.
The OER community is working on ways to ensure that OER adhere to both facets of the Open Content Definition, permission and ability, but comprehensive answers to these questions have yet to be hammered out. For now, all that can be urged is that authors of OER share the source files of the resources they create, raw text, raw video, LaTeX files, .DOCX files, etc. in addition to the files in the form they are meant to be consumed in. OER distributed only as PDFs thought they might be difficult to edit, at least they are free of traditional copyright restrictions usually in the form of Creative Commons licenses which provide users the permission to exercise the five Rs which is far more than traditional educational resources allow.

Open Content Definition:

For redistributing revised or remixed versions of this page: This material is based on original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 3, 2017 at 4:37 PM

    The Twitter links are really cool. Great visual appeal and excellent content.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Capstone Project Proposal

As my capstone project in the SPARC Leadership Program I will pursue the conversion of a class that spans multiple sections, taught by several instructors from assigning a costly resource to using OER. I understand that textbooks used in this type of class are picked not by individual instructors rather by a decision-making entity like a department chair or a committee. Through an iterative, systematic approach I hope to convince this entity to switch from using costly traditional resources to OER for use in classes taking place in 2019. Relationship building and needs assessments will be performed in the first half of 2018. Maintaining those relationships, the remainder of 2018 will consist of work done to modify or supplement an existing resource to fit the needs of the body of instructors who will be using it. It is worth mentioning that I do plan on targeting Calculus classes. At this stage I have Calculus in mind because of the existing relationship the OER team of which I am a ...
Post a Comment
Read more