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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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Course Hero Quietly Took Over Hosting Lumen’s OER Content. They Say It’s No Big Deal

Edsurge

Clicking onto their favorite courses at the end of May, educators found that they were getting redirected somewhere else. To their surprise, however, the educators found themselves not on Lumen’s website but on Course Hero, a homework-help site that’s blocked by some higher ed institutions for its use by some students as a cheating tool.

OER 176
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A New Model for OER Sustainability and Continuous Improvement

Iterating Toward Openness

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?

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Introducing the CARE Framework for OER Stewardship

Doug Levin

In a post of nearly two years ago (“ OERwashing: Beyond the Elephant Test “), I argued that the OER community lacked a reliable way to assess new entrants to the OER field, especially for-profit organizations, in terms of their support for openness and OER community values. Petrides, L., and Watson, C.E.

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What a Homework Help Site’s Move to Host Open Educational Resources Could Mean

Edsurge

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. When educators stumbled onto the fact that hosting had changed hands, it provoked a backlash.

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Lumen Learning, a Proponent of OER, Makes First Acquisition to Offer Faculty Coaching

Edsurge

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.

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David, Goliath, and the Future of the U.S. K-12 OER Movement

Doug Levin

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.

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