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An Accidental, Systematic Attack on OER Sustainability Models

Iterating Toward Openness

Many institutions charge students a fee associated with their OER courses as a way of funding the institutions’ OER efforts. For example, Kansas State University’s Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative course fee is a $10 fee that is payed by students in courses that use OER and other free, traditionally copyrighted resources.

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17 things to know about K-12 OER textbooks

Hapara

Has your school district started to use open educational resources (OER) yet? But has your school district considered K-12 OER textbooks? Printed textbooks have been used for centuries, and while they still work, there are many reasons why school districts are transitioning to OER versions. .

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Faculty are Losing Interest in Adopting OER

Iterating Toward Openness

The authors then explain these results as follows: There has been a notable increase in the amount of faculty creating and using OER since 2018 (see Figure 39). Or faculty were taking the time to carefully vet the licensing of the resources they found and specifically chose OER to include in their courses?

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LLMs, Embeddings, Context Injection, and Next Generation OER

Iterating Toward Openness

This is what large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are doing to OER. Next generation OER will not be open textbooks that were created faster or more efficiently because LLMs wrote first drafts in minutes. That’s current generation OER simply made more efficiently.

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On the Relationship Between Adopting OER and Improving Student Outcomes

Iterating Toward Openness

This article started out with my being bothered by the fact that ‘OER adoption reliably saves students money but does not reliably improve their outcomes.’ ’ For many years OER advocates have told faculty, “When you adopt OER your students save money and get the same or better outcomes!”

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OER / ZTC Advocates Have an AI Problem

Iterating Toward Openness

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.

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Expensive Textbooks Are Still A Problem. Will Higher Quality OER Help?

Edsurge

These days low-cost alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, are getting a boost as a potential solution. Last week, for example, Lumen Learning, a company that sells low-cost OER textbooks and courseware, announced it received a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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