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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!”

OER 147
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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.

OER 114
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Some Very Bad News about the UNESCO OER Recommendation

Iterating Toward Openness

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.

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OER Cost Savings and Adoption Rates: New Methodologies, New Data, and New Results

Iterating Toward Openness

At the OpenEd Conference in 2013, Nicole Allen and I challenged the OER community to save students one billion dollars. Below I present the results of some exploratory data analysis intended to answer basic questions. The overall average price for all OER (both OER Only and OER Hybrid) is $17.32. OER Hybrid.

OER 114
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Using open educational resources to empower differentiated instruction

Hapara

Open educational resources, also known as OER, provide a great way to supplement curriculum to differentiate instruction and better meet each learner’s needs in your classroom. This use case is the perfect example of when OER can come to the rescue. So what does that mean? What is differentiation? Addressing reading levels.

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The RISE Package for R: Reducing Time Through the OER Continuous Improvement Cycle

Iterating Toward Openness

By definition, open educational resources (OER) are licensed in a manner that gives you permission to change, update, and improve them. Learning analytics, on the other hand, can provide great insight into where course materials – including OER – are not effectively supporting student learning.

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

Edsurge

But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. They can with OER materials. That means OER courseware is the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of learning engineering, Wiley argues. Every course should be better every time it’s taught,” he says.

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