Cody Taylor: SPARC OER Leadership Program

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...

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. On...

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...