Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

As I’ve been (re-)reading OER adoption research through a more critical lens I’m seeing a recurring pattern of significant threats to validity in the designs of studies purporting to measure the impact of OER adoption on student outcomes. Many research studies fail to address the way instructors end up using OER.

OER 109

OER Outcomes Study Course 109

Iterating Toward Openness

APRIL 11, 2022

I’ve been interested in sustainability models for OER for decades. And for just as long, I’ve believed that there are useful lessons for us to learn on this topic from open source software – OER’s far more popular and influential sibling. What does “bug” mean in the context of OER?

OER 147

OER Analysis Software Outcomes 147

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 21, 2023

At some point over the last decade, open educational resources (OER) advocacy in US higher education became zero textbook costs (ZTC) advocacy. But OER / ZTC advocates have had a fundamental problem simmering for many years now, and the recent advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 will quickly bring that simmer to a boil.

OER 109

OER Advocacy Outcomes Instructional Materials 109

Edsurge

JUNE 18, 2020

It didn’t align with the structure of her course. But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. Every course should be better every time it’s taught,” he says. They can with OER materials. That allows me to make mid-course corrections—or mid-week corrections.”

Course 186

Course OER Resources Education 186

Doug Levin

MAY 12, 2015

and I am merely a fan – not a fanboy – of open educational resources (OER).** Others surely see me as some sort of OER fanatic. So, if these are the actions of someone who is an OER fan, what stops me short of claiming fanboy status? I work in K-12 education in the U.S., I beg to disagree. Image credits.

OER 297

OER Instructional Materials Khan Academy Outcomes 297

Iterating Toward Openness

JUNE 23, 2020

This fall I’m once again teaching IPT 531: Introduction to Open Education at BYU (check it out – it’s designed so anyone can participate) and today I’m beginning a pilot run-through of the course redesign with a small number of students. In the past I’ve written frequently about how we evaluate the impact of OER use.

OER 166

OER Education Course Learning Analytics 166

The Journal

JULY 11, 2017

Finally, OER is coming of age! Finally, OER is coming of age!

OER 303

OER Course Resources Education 303

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Student: I’ll study whether students learn better with OER than with traditional course materials! We’d talk about why these studies almost always result in “no significant difference.” (And if you’re thinking, “just increasing access to course materials will make a significant difference in student learning!”,

OER 116

OER Comparison Study Course 116

Edsurge

OCTOBER 11, 2018

Regardless of where you stand on the debate over open educational resources, you’re probably wondering: Does OER actually improve learning outcomes? At least, that was one of the main takeaways from a short session led by Phillip Grimaldi, director of research at OpenStax, a nonprofit OER initiative out of Rice University.

OER 124

OER Learning Outcomes Comparison 124

Iterating Toward Openness

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

Last week I promised I would write a few posts about reducing friction with regard to OER. In last week’s post I talked about how we’re making it ridiculously easy for students, faculty, and others to contribute to the maintenance and improvement of OER. “How much easier could it be? ” you might ask.

OER 96

OER Secondary Software Outcomes 96

Iterating Toward Openness

OCTOBER 9, 2018

Recently I’ve been doing both more thinking and more roll-up-your-sleeves working on continuous improvement of OER. Some have research, grant writing, and publication responsibilities in addition to teaching their courses. Some teach five or six courses per semester. Simon , 1986). Beginning the cycle again.

OER 114

OER Outcomes Analysis Assessment 114

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

There’s great news out of the recent UNESCO meeting in Paris, where member states unanimously adopted the draft Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). This dramatically simplifies understanding what is and isn’t OER. Resources in the public domain or released under an open license are OER.

OER 120

OER Advocacy Resources Accessibility 120

Doug Levin

FEBRUARY 21, 2016

K-12 education system by open educational resources (OER) since 2009, although my first exposure to the ideas and leaders of the movement stretch back to the launch of the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. This is where context matters most for the OER movement. Even within the U.S.

OER 170

OER Instructional Materials Advocacy Meeting 170

Edsurge

JUNE 16, 2020

Lumen Learning, a company that sells low-cost OER textbooks and courseware, plans to start offering professional development services for faculty that can be bundled with its titles. In other words, some of its textbooks are now sold with coaching on how to teach with OER more effectively.

OER 108

OER Company Learning Course 108

Iterating Toward Openness

AUGUST 27, 2019

As the movement grew and more people began advocating for the adoption of OER in place of traditionally copyrighted materials in classes, some advocates chose to make cost the primary focus of their advocacy. Materials that were openly licensed and free were the OER we had spent the last decade advocating for. grey below).

OER 112

OER Advocacy Policies Libraries 112

The CoolCatTeacher

JUNE 7, 2015

Award Winning Science Teacher Amy Pace Shares How She Uses OER Textbooks Amy Pace is a Presidential Award winning science teacher. She is using “free” OER textbooks for all her courses. OER stands for Open Education Resources which are often curated by experts via grants and other means. Of course, nothing is free.

OER 150

OER Course Resources Meeting 150

Edsurge

JANUARY 4, 2018

But who makes the pitch for free or low-cost alternatives to textbooks known as OER, or open educational resources? One project she led this year involved creating a series of videos promoting “Textbook Heroes,”professors who have replaced commercial textbooks in their courses with OER. And it kind of hinders everything.”

OER 161

OER Libraries lynda.com E-rate 161

The Journal

AUGUST 22, 2016

Gooru.org is an OER marketplace with 5,000,000+ open education resources. But, most excitingly, they are posting "just" 35 full courses that teachers can "copy and customize." We applaud gooru.org for taking this major step in providing support for teachers who are trying to #GoOpen!

OER 150

OER Course Resources Education 150

Edsurge

JANUARY 15, 2019

But fans of OER are increasingly facing a problem. While OER started off as free online textbooks, it still costs money to produce these materials, and professors often need guidance finding which ones are high quality. So OER advocates are realizing they need to change their pitch.

OER 132

OER Course Resources Libraries 132

Edsurge

OCTOBER 30, 2018

The number of colleges running efforts to help professors shift from published textbooks to low-cost online materials known as OER is growing rapidly. Nearly two thirds of colleges in the survey—64 percent—reported campus programs to “encourage faculty to use OER content for their courses.” which was released today.

OER 122

OER Survey Data Course 122

Iterating Toward Openness

JANUARY 31, 2020

I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. There are some things about working with OER that are just harder or more painful than they need to be, and getting more people actively involved in using OER will require us to reduce or eliminate those points of friction.

OER 103

OER LMS Software Course 103

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 7, 2018

tl ;dr – If a resource is licensed in a way that grants you permission to engage in the 5R activities, and grants you those permissions for free, it’s an open educational resource (OER) – no matter where you find it or how it’s being used. Consider the following scenarios: A person downloads an OER to their laptop.

OER 86

OER LMS Laptops Accessibility 86

Iterating Toward Openness

APRIL 25, 2019

I spend most of my time doing fairly tactical thinking and working focused on moving OER adoption forward in the US higher education space. In this vision of the world, OER replace traditionally copyrighted, expensive textbooks for all primary, secondary, and post-secondary courses. My end goal isn’t to increase OER adoption.

OER 73

OER Course Company Smartphone 73

Iterating Toward Openness

DECEMBER 2, 2019

I recently wrote a brief essay about the wonderful new UNESCO OER Recommendation. For those of you who don’t want to read the full analysis below, here’s the key takeaway: Imagine what would happen if making copies of OER was illegal. Under the definition of OER now adopted unanimously by UNESCO member states, it can be.

OER 111

OER Accessibility Examples Resources 111

Iterating Toward Openness

DECEMBER 20, 2018

At the OpenEd Conference in 2013, Nicole Allen and I challenged the OER community to save students one billion dollars. As a brief summary, part of the data collection involved sampling the prices for required course materials across a range of material formats, including new print, used print, print rental, digital rental, and loose-leaf.

OER 114

OER Data Analysis Secondary 114

Edsurge

AUGUST 4, 2022

In May, the homework-help site that relies on student-generated content, Course Hero, dipped its toes into freely available, openly licensed alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, course materials. Course Hero officials say that the negative reaction came as a surprise.

OER 137

OER Resources Education Course 137

Edsurge

OCTOBER 24, 2018

One popular draw to open educational resources is that these openly-licensed learning materials can—and are often encouraged to—be tailored for a particular professor or course. Communications librarian Kristen Hoffman oversees much of the OER work at Seattle Pacific University, a Christian university in Washington.

OER 107

OER Libraries Course Study 107

Iterating Toward Openness

FEBRUARY 5, 2024

In the early 2000s, MIT OpenCourseWare put forth a more coherent strategy of openly licensing the entire collection of materials faculty had developed for a specific course. Of course innovation with OER didn’t actually stop with openly licensed traditional textbooks. And that’s essentially where innovation stopped.

Strategy 150

Strategy OER Education Policies 150

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 11, 2020

In the first installment on Monday, I explained how a fundamental failure to understand copyright makes the definition of OER in the new UNESCO recommendation nonsensical. In the second installment yesterday, I described how it appears that many in the OER community have taken their eye off the ball of student learning.

OER 78

OER Case Study System Strategy 78

Iterating Toward Openness

JANUARY 24, 2019

Among other things, the post discusses her role in my decision to abandon the phrase “open pedagogy” and adopt the phrase “OER-enabled pedagogy.” So when people tell the story of how the term “OER-enabled pedagogy” came to be they should absolutely include Maha in it.

OER 113

OER Technology Exercises Online Learning 113

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 8, 2017

These are purchasing programs in which “institutions are signing up whole classes of students to automatically receive digital course materials at a discounted rate, rather than purchasing individually.” And obviously, both inclusive access and OER are about solving the cost problem. Can you see it? A distraction.

OER 161

OER Accessibility Pearson MOOC 161

Edsurge

DECEMBER 28, 2017

Open educational resources (OER) have long been touted as “the next big thing” in higher education, but the drawn-out hype has led many educators and administrators to wonder if it would ever live up to its expectations. Those days are over: 2017 was OER’s breakthrough year. That happened in 2017. Ohio University is doing the same.

OER 128

OER Tools Industry LMS 128

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 18, 2019

There would be huge benefits to the OER ecosystem if we made similar arguments with commercial publishers, helping them understand why switching to an OER model would be good for their business. Why Commercial Publishers Should Switch to an OER Model. And a switch to OER would help publishers solve both of them.

OER 80

OER Advocacy Software Company 80

Iterating Toward Openness

FEBRUARY 21, 2024

For many years now what people call OER advocacy has actually been “zero textbook cost” advocacy. So for the last decade or so there has been a lot of energy devoted to either “OER programs with a laser focus on cost savings” or “zero textbook cost” programs.

Policies 99

Policies OER Advocacy Education 99

Edsurge

JUNE 22, 2017

And that’s been the driver behind nonprofit Achieving the Dream ’s (ATD) OER Degree Initiative , where 38 U.S. community colleges are creating full degree programs that utilize open educational resources (OER) from start to finish. We are hoping to use those courses as a foundation to build on other degrees.”

OER 111

OER Course Outcomes Report 111

Edsurge

OCTOBER 30, 2018

It’s not uncommon to stumble upon headlines about students spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on course materials. In response, open educational materials, or OER, have emerged as an alternative to expensive textbooks that disproportionately affect low-income students. McGuire’s team is researching some of them.

OER 125

OER Policies Accessibility Outcomes 125

Edsurge

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

Students who took multiple community college courses that used only free or low-cost OER materials earned more credits over time than their peers who took classes that used traditional course materials such as textbooks, according to a new study. Free Isn’t Free For students, OER texts are typically free, or nearly free.

OER 155

OER Resources Course Education 155