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Open Educational Resources (OER)

Why OER?

Why Use OER?

There are many reasons instructors might want to use OER: 

Free and Legal to Use, Improve and Share

  • Save time and energy by adapting or revising resources that have already been created
  • Tailor educational resources to the specific content for your course
  • Expand opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching and learning by allowing you to integrate and revise multiple educational resources
  • Redefine "traditional" learning by incorporating multi-media or scenario-based education
  • Go beyond the confines of "teaching to the book"

Network and Collaborate with Peers 

  • Access educational resources that have already been "peer reviewed" by other experts in your field
  • Review or annotation features and texts so other instructors have more in-depth knowledge of the resource and its quality quickly
  • Make learning and teaching a team project using collaborative platforms

Lower Educational Cost and Improve Access to Information

  • Reduce the cost of course materials, particularly textbooks so that all students have access and aren't as financially burdened
  • Find and access information instantly on virtually any topic, on various devices.
  • Give learners the option of looking at course content openly before enrolling.
  • Reduce the load students bear, possibly increasing graduation and retention rates.

Impact

Hoping to learn more? There have been multiple studies on faculty implementations, misunderstandings, acceptance of, and evaluation of OER. The Review Project has curated a number of empirical studies published in scholarly journals on the topic. Their general conclusion is: 

Once adopted, OER provide the permissions necessary for faculty to engage in a wide range of pedagogical innovations. In each of the studies reported above, OER were used in manner very similar to the traditional textbooks they replaced. We look forward to reviewing empirical articles describing the learning impacts of open pedagogies.

HOW ARE OER LICENSED?

Not all, but many creators of OER choose to apply licenses indicating how others can use their work. Most commonly used are Creative Commons licenses, or a set of statements that indicate the author's wishes when it comes to citing their work, using it for commercial purposes, adapting it, and redistributing it.

LICENSE OPTIONS

Six Creative Commons licenses are frequently used by creators of OER. These licenses indicate whether authors want to allow their material to be used for commercial purposes, modified, or redistributed.

This graphic shows the six Creative Commons licenses with descriptions of the permissions that they allow.

The 5 R's

When it is said OER are openly licensed, it means that they can be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed. In practice this means:

  • 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 settings like classes, study groups, on websites, in videos, etc.
  • 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)

(See OpenContent.org, UNESCO and OER Commons for the above definitions).

BENEFITS OF ADOPTING OER

Cost & Retention
OER programs report saving students millions on the cost of education. Low costs mean that students can access course materials from the start of class and, therefore, have every opportunity to succeed.

Customization
Faculty members can customize their class instruction for their students using. David Wiley, adjunct faculty at BYU, argues compellingly in "iterating toward openness" that OER can facilitate more meaningful, more inclusive pedagogical practices.

Increasing Support for 'Plug & Play' Resources
For instructors who have little time to adapt resources, OER projects like OpenStax and the Open Learning Initiative (Carnegie Mellon) are increasingly making "packaged" resources available. Packaged resources include textbooks with accompanying ancillary resources (slides, clicker exercises, learning materials) and entire courses and course modules.

Student-Driven, Multimodal Learning
OER are one way of engaging students more deeply in the educational process, moving beyond lecture and text. Open education gives instructors the tools to involve students in the creation of learning materials.

Lifelong Learning
Because OER are open, they allow students to return to course content again and again--before and after courses.

BARRIERS TO ADOPTING OER

Permanence
Digital information--including OER--can disappear if it's not archived and backed up in a trusted repository.

Potential Corporatization
Corporatization is one reason for the sharp rise in cost of educational materials. There is concern that, as companies like Amazon take on OER, they will also monopolize or otherwise limit the openness of the OER.

Complex IP issues
Although OER use open licenses in part to reduce complexity around intellectual property, issues do arise. Open licensing in itself can be a challenge to navigate; in addition, third-party materials like media and images may introduce complexity into any OER project.

Missing ancillary resources
Although some OER projects like OpenStax are working to incorporate more resources for instructors and students, other open resources lack instructor copies, outlines, quizzes/tests, clicker exercises, and materials that can make publisher offerings attractive.

Quality issues
OER may be produced with little added support for copy-editing and design. In addition, some may not be updated as frequently as the education community might like.

Time
Creating and/or locating existing OER can be extremely time-consuming. For this reason, libraries, administrators, and instructional designers at various institutions are increasingly providing support for faculty members who wish to use OER in their courses.