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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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When is an OER an OER?

Iterating Toward Openness

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. I have an obsession with definitions. It’s been true for decades.

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Can a For-Profit, Venture-Backed Company Keep OER Free—and Be Financially Sustainable?

Edsurge

New and traditional publishers are trying to offer alternatives such as open educational resources (OER), or freely downloadable and adaptable learning materials. But some providers of OER still ask for fees in return, and that has advocates concerned. The company is also banking on authors and adopters to check for quality themselves.

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Thoughts on Continuous Improvement and OER

Iterating Toward Openness

Recently I’ve been doing both more thinking and more roll-up-your-sleeves working on continuous improvement of OER. And this process of making OER more effective every semester – also known as “continuous improvement” – is where we see some of the most exciting opportunities to collaborate with faculty.

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'Better Every Semester': How Faculty Use Open Educational Resources to Improve Courses

Edsurge

So Hardy and a colleague decided to create their own lab manual—and make it open access. But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. They can with OER materials. “It was not good at all,” Hardy says. “I Every course should be better every time it’s taught,” he says.

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10 of the best K-12 sources for digital textbooks online

Hapara

While textbook publishing companies now offer digital versions, you can also find open textbook options online. Digital textbooks are textbooks that teachers and learners can access online or download to their devices. In addition, educators and learners can access them on multiple devices at any time. . OER Commons.

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Are K-12 Curriculum Tools a Smart Investment? What Investors and Our Data Say

Edsurge

In conversations with edtech investors, some reported that the K-12 market has seen an influx of instructional content, particularly in the form of open educational resources (OERs). OERs are openly-licensed educational materials that can be downloaded, modified and shared with others to help support student learning.

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