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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. Consider the following scenarios: A person downloads an OER to their laptop.

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?Scaling Mobile Technology for Community College Students: 5 Tips for Entrepreneurs

Edsurge

After three years of utilizing a BYOD (bring your own device) policy with my classes at Nassau Community College, I have seen how tools like tablets and laptops can lead to better academic engagement. Many of my students find themselves composing essays across a variety of devices, phones, personal laptops or campus desktops.

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Can Technology in the Classroom Replace Expensive Textbooks

Kitaboo on EdTech

Smartphones, tablets, and laptops had become a permanent requirement along with using technology in the classrooms by this time. Cengage recently introduced a new subscription model that gives students access to all of the company’s digital course materials for a semester or an year. These are basically free.

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Small District Offers Students Big Possibilities

Education Superhighway

When Superintendent Tim Farquer was faced with replacing some of the district’s outdated textbooks, he knew he couldn’t buy new materials and supply his 300 students with laptops. The decision to be an early adopter of OER put the one-school district on the map, earning a visit in 2015 from then-U.S.

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From here to there: Musings about the path to having good OER for every course on campus

Iterating Toward Openness

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.

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Do We Need a National Open Education Strategy?

Iterating Toward Openness

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.

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A Thinking Person’s Guide to EdTech News (2017 Week 33 Edition)

Doug Levin

And what kind of impact data should they be tracking over the course of a season? Using half of the funds, the Texas Education Agency contracted with OpenStax, a nonprofit based at Rice University, to write textbooks for several popular high school STEM courses. Tagged on: August 17, 2017 Do Laptops Help Learning?

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