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In 2016, OER (Open Education Resources) are undergoing a major transformation: rather than educators needing to struggle with searching OER repositories containing millions of OER objects and then trying to stitch together those OER objects into coherent lessons, organizations such as Open Up Resources are producing curriculum-scale, OER-based courses. Finally, OER is coming of age MORE
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. MORE
As schools and districts try to reduce textbook costs and digitize instructional resources, one of the struggles many teachers have is finding good repositories of open education resources (OER). The first step is to know how to access OER resources. Accessing OER. Department of Education has its #GoOpen District Launch Packet , and Open Learning has a free online course (about 15 hours) on how to develop OER content. How to find OER. MORE
Inspired by MIT’s example, hundreds of other institutions around the world began openly publishing the resources they created in support of their courses. Creating and sharing OER did not harm their ability to succeed in accomplishing their core missions – the education of their students. And there are many reasons to believe that their efforts in creating and sharing OER actually advanced their core missions. 18) for the creation of OER-based degrees (see SEC. MORE
For some folks in higher ed, the very idea of using open educational resources (OER) sparks dread. The right OER provides professors opportunities to teach the latest research and even make areas like math and science more inclusive. MORE
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. For several years I have used a shorthand definition of OER as “free access plus permission to engage in the 5R activities.” Consider the following scenarios: A person downloads an OER to their laptop. MORE
In case you didn’t see it elsewhere, I’m republishing the press release from Achieving the Dream about the incredibly exciting OER Degrees work that launched today. OER Degree Initiative will accelerate use of openly licensed learning materials in higher education and cut costs to students while improving degree and certificate completion. The effort is intended to spark more rapid adoption of OER within higher education, beginning with community colleges. MORE
Heather’s post is reacting to this quote from an article she read recently: “There is one additional requirement for widespread OER adoption. If you believe that open educational resources are public goods , which they appear to be since they are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, then it can be hard to avoid bringing the rest of that conceptual framework (including the idea of the free rider problem ) to your thinking about OER. MORE
He writes, “While to an OER advocate faculty are mere pawns to their agenda, to publishers, faculty are critical partners in academic success.” ” The overwhelming majority of OER advocates are faculty, and they have become OER advocates for two reasons. However, the second reason faculty have become OER advocates – and more of them are becoming OER advocates each day – has less to do with price and more to do with empowerment. MORE
Recently I’ve been doing both more thinking and more roll-up-your-sleeves working on continuous improvement of OER. Some have research, grant writing, and publication responsibilities in addition to teaching their courses. Some teach five or six courses per semester. 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. MORE
There’s great news out of the recent UNESCO meeting in Paris, where member states unanimously adopted the draft Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). Regardless of what other individuals, institutions, or organizations may think or say, UNESCO is the creator of the term “open educational resources” and, as its creator, UNESCO’s definition of OER is the canonical definition. This dramatically simplifies understanding what is and isn’t OER. MORE
There would be huge benefits to the OER ecosystem if we made similar arguments with commercial publishers, helping them understand why switching to an OER model would be good for their business. Why Commercial Publishers Should Switch to an OER Model. And a switch to OER would help publishers solve both of them. The harsh business reality for publishers is that they are competing in a world increasingly filled with OER. A switch to OER makes that happen. MORE
In the first installment on Monday, I explained how a fundamental failure to understand copyright makes the definition of OER in the new UNESCO recommendation nonsensical. The search for a model that will reliably sustain OER initiatives over the long-term has been underway for over 20 years. MORE
Suzan has recently defended her doctoral dissertation on open participants’ experiences in a massive open online course. When we look at common definitions of Open Educational Resources or OERs (e.g., OER Commons , The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ) it is clear that there is tendency to equate open educational resources to open educational materials and tools , such as course materials in text, audio, or video format, open textbooks, and educational software. MORE
Earlier this week I read an op-ed – sponsored by Pearson – titled “If OER is the answer, what is the question?” OER often shine in their variety and ability to deepen resources for niche topics. While it’s possible to build a complete course from OER, the finished product often lacks the scaffolding found in courseware authored by single author/editorial/product teams. T = the fraction of those people with Time available to work on OER. MORE
This fall I’m once again teaching IPT 531: Introduction to Open Education at BYU (check it out – it’s designed so anyone can participate) and today I’m beginning a pilot run-through of the course redesign with a small number of students. MORE
It didn’t align with the structure of her course. But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. Every course should be better every time it’s taught,” he says. “It’s They can with OER materials. “I’ve MORE
Since OER came onto the map in the early 2000s, the pool of available resources has grown into a vast ocean. With a wide array of OER materials at our fingertips, the trick now is not so much in finding OER, but on identifying high quality OER that can be used and transformed for our classroom needs. These credible sites offer a wealth of vetted, high quality OER resources, categorized and sorted for easy navigation. MORE
These are purchasing programs in which “institutions are signing up whole classes of students to automatically receive digital course materials at a discounted rate, rather than purchasing individually.” The inclusive access model’s goal of reducing the cost of textbooks apparently reminded the article’s author of OER, because she includes some discussion of OER toward the end of the article. MORE
I spend most of my time doing fairly tactical thinking and working focused on moving OER adoption forward in the US higher education space. I made what was probably the clearest statement of my vision for the future of learning materials in my Shuttleworth Fellowship application several years ago: My long-term goal is to create a world where OER are used pervasively throughout primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools. Now, make no mistake – OER is a means, not an end. MORE
As the movement grew and more people began advocating for the adoption of OER in place of traditionally copyrighted materials in classes, some advocates chose to make cost the primary focus of their advocacy. Materials that were openly licensed and free were the OER we had spent the last decade advocating for. As the above diagram shows, ZTC and OER advocates share common ground (green above), but also have important differences driven by their primary priorities. MORE
Gooru.org is an OER marketplace with 5,000,000+ open education resources. But, most excitingly, they are posting "just" 35 full courses that teachers can "copy and customize." We applaud gooru.org for taking this major step in providing support for teachers who are trying to #GoOpen MORE
Among other things, the post discusses her role in my decision to abandon the phrase “open pedagogy” and adopt the phrase “OER-enabled pedagogy.” To make this easier for future scholars looking for a (relatively) short description written from my own perspective, here is the tl;dr of the process by which I adopted the term “OER-enabled pedagogy.” OER-enabled pedagogy does nothing of the sort. oer-enabled-pedagogy MORE
and I am merely a fan – not a fanboy – of open educational resources (OER).** Others surely see me as some sort of OER fanatic. After all, I’ve advocated for federal support for the development, use, and adaptation of OER (see, e.g. , the May 5 Education Week story by Sean Cavanagh, “ ‘Open Educational Resources’ Promoted in U.S. So, if these are the actions of someone who is an OER fan, what stops me short of claiming fanboy status? MORE
Because I can’t stop thinking about open, I’ve been pondering the relationship between solar power and OER. ”, “How can you sell OER if they’re free?”, ”, and “If OER are free, why would anyone pay you?” Of course, I could have stopped everything else in my life for a few months and learned most of what I needed to know to answer these questions myself. OER are a lot like sunlight. Sunlight and OER are free. MORE
Regardless of where you stand on the debate over open educational resources, you’re probably wondering: Does OER actually improve learning outcomes? At least, that was one of the main takeaways from a short session led by Phillip Grimaldi, director of research at OpenStax, a nonprofit OER initiative out of Rice University. The problem is, the research today treats OER like any other intervention and we expect it to impact all students,” he said. MORE
Award Winning Science Teacher Amy Pace Shares How She Uses OER Textbooks Amy Pace is a Presidential Award winning science teacher. She is using “free” OER textbooks for all her courses. OER stands for Open Education Resources which are often curated by experts via grants and other means. Of course, nothing is free. Visionary states, districts, and schools might find a money-saving resource with OERs. OER Commons – Index of OER Resources. MORE
At the OpenEd Conference in 2013, Nicole Allen and I challenged the OER community to save students one billion dollars. As a brief summary, part of the data collection involved sampling the prices for required course materials across a range of material formats, including new print, used print, print rental, digital rental, and loose-leaf. The overall average price for all OER (both OER Only and OER Hybrid) is $17.32. The adoption rate of OER is 6.3%. MORE
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. The tl;dr. MORE
I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. I’ve been writing about continuous improvement in the context of OER for a few years now. A Framework for the Continuous Improvement of OER. MORE
Last week, the K-12 OER Collaborative entered the next phase of their project, awarding contracts for rapid prototypes to the following developers: edCount LLC. As a refresher, the K-12 OER Collaborative is a project to create comprehensive CCSS-aligned curriculum for grades K-12 math and English Language Arts that is open licensed under a CC BY license. This may be the one of the important opportunities for OER, blended learning, and CCSS we’ve seen to date. MORE
Last week I promised I would write a few posts about reducing friction with regard to OER. In last week’s post I talked about how we’re making it ridiculously easy for students, faculty, and others to contribute to the maintenance and improvement of OER. MORE
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. I’m deeply grateful for the support and collegiality of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation over this time, including for allowing me to attend this year’s annual OER meeting. This is where context matters most for the OER movement. MORE
Five years ago, in an essay called 2017: RIP OER? , I pondered whether this year would be the end of OER. To the best of my knowledge there is no one really working on next gen OER – OER that are interactive, simulative, really rich with multimedia AND combined with OAR [open assessment resources] that drive diagnosis, remediation, and adaptation. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER. Much has been written about 2012 being “the year of OER.” MORE
Student: I’ll study whether students learn better with OER than with traditional course materials! We would also discuss people’s uncontrollable urge to conduct media comparison studies – studies comparing student learning in the context of iPads versus printed books, or online classes versus face to face classes, or interactive video disc versus televised courses, or some other setup in which the medium du jour is compared with the medium of yesteryear. MORE
I believe we’re seeing this same effect across OER adoptions, and have labeled it the Remix Hypothesis. The availability of these data enable truly objective, head-to-head comparisons of OER and commercial products, and set the stage for conversations about students’ academic return on investment in course materials. That’s a fight I know OER can win. It’s also why OER effectiveness research needs to be putting its very best foot forward. MORE
Edsurge
NOVEMBER 15, 2021
For some folks in higher ed, the very idea of using open educational resources (OER) sparks dread. The right OER provides professors opportunities to teach the latest research and even make areas like math and science more inclusive.
The Journal
JULY 11, 2017
In 2016, OER (Open Education Resources) are undergoing a major transformation: rather than educators needing to struggle with searching OER repositories containing millions of OER objects and then trying to stitch together those OER objects into coherent lessons, organizations such as Open Up Resources are producing curriculum-scale, OER-based courses. Finally, OER is coming of age
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Iterating Toward Openness
NOVEMBER 12, 2019
Student: I’ll study whether students learn better with OER than with traditional course materials! We would also discuss people’s uncontrollable urge to conduct media comparison studies – studies comparing student learning in the context of iPads versus printed books, or online classes versus face to face classes, or interactive video disc versus televised courses, or some other setup in which the medium du jour is compared with the medium of yesteryear.
The CoolCatTeacher
JUNE 7, 2015
Award Winning Science Teacher Amy Pace Shares How She Uses OER Textbooks Amy Pace is a Presidential Award winning science teacher. She is using “free” OER textbooks for all her courses. OER stands for Open Education Resources which are often curated by experts via grants and other means. Of course, nothing is free. Visionary states, districts, and schools might find a money-saving resource with OERs. OER Commons – Index of OER Resources.
Iterating Toward Openness
MARCH 7, 2018
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. For several years I have used a shorthand definition of OER as “free access plus permission to engage in the 5R activities.” Consider the following scenarios: A person downloads an OER to their laptop.
Doug Levin
MAY 12, 2015
and I am merely a fan – not a fanboy – of open educational resources (OER).** Others surely see me as some sort of OER fanatic. After all, I’ve advocated for federal support for the development, use, and adaptation of OER (see, e.g. , the May 5 Education Week story by Sean Cavanagh, “ ‘Open Educational Resources’ Promoted in U.S. So, if these are the actions of someone who is an OER fan, what stops me short of claiming fanboy status?
Iterating Toward Openness
FEBRUARY 10, 2020
Last week I promised I would write a few posts about reducing friction with regard to OER. In last week’s post I talked about how we’re making it ridiculously easy for students, faculty, and others to contribute to the maintenance and improvement of OER.
The Journal
AUGUST 22, 2016
Gooru.org is an OER marketplace with 5,000,000+ open education resources. But, most excitingly, they are posting "just" 35 full courses that teachers can "copy and customize." We applaud gooru.org for taking this major step in providing support for teachers who are trying to #GoOpen
K12 Open Ed
APRIL 27, 2015
Last week, the K-12 OER Collaborative entered the next phase of their project, awarding contracts for rapid prototypes to the following developers: edCount LLC. As a refresher, the K-12 OER Collaborative is a project to create comprehensive CCSS-aligned curriculum for grades K-12 math and English Language Arts that is open licensed under a CC BY license. This may be the one of the important opportunities for OER, blended learning, and CCSS we’ve seen to date.
Iterating Toward Openness
JUNE 23, 2020
This fall I’m once again teaching IPT 531: Introduction to Open Education at BYU (check it out – it’s designed so anyone can participate) and today I’m beginning a pilot run-through of the course redesign with a small number of students.
Wisewire
JULY 31, 2017
Since OER came onto the map in the early 2000s, the pool of available resources has grown into a vast ocean. With a wide array of OER materials at our fingertips, the trick now is not so much in finding OER, but on identifying high quality OER that can be used and transformed for our classroom needs. These credible sites offer a wealth of vetted, high quality OER resources, categorized and sorted for easy navigation.
|
Iterating Toward Openness
DECEMBER 2, 2019
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. The tl;dr.
Edsurge
JUNE 18, 2020
It didn’t align with the structure of her course. But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. Every course should be better every time it’s taught,” he says. “It’s They can with OER materials. “I’ve
Iterating Toward Openness
OCTOBER 12, 2015
He writes, “While to an OER advocate faculty are mere pawns to their agenda, to publishers, faculty are critical partners in academic success.” ” The overwhelming majority of OER advocates are faculty, and they have become OER advocates for two reasons. However, the second reason faculty have become OER advocates – and more of them are becoming OER advocates each day – has less to do with price and more to do with empowerment.
Iterating Toward Openness
JANUARY 24, 2019
Among other things, the post discusses her role in my decision to abandon the phrase “open pedagogy” and adopt the phrase “OER-enabled pedagogy.” To make this easier for future scholars looking for a (relatively) short description written from my own perspective, here is the tl;dr of the process by which I adopted the term “OER-enabled pedagogy.” OER-enabled pedagogy does nothing of the sort. oer-enabled-pedagogy
Iterating Toward Openness
OCTOBER 9, 2018
Recently I’ve been doing both more thinking and more roll-up-your-sleeves working on continuous improvement of OER. Some have research, grant writing, and publication responsibilities in addition to teaching their courses. Some teach five or six courses per semester. 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.
Iterating Toward Openness
JUNE 28, 2016
Inspired by MIT’s example, hundreds of other institutions around the world began openly publishing the resources they created in support of their courses. Creating and sharing OER did not harm their ability to succeed in accomplishing their core missions – the education of their students. And there are many reasons to believe that their efforts in creating and sharing OER actually advanced their core missions. 18) for the creation of OER-based degrees (see SEC.
Iterating Toward Openness
AUGUST 10, 2016
Because I can’t stop thinking about open, I’ve been pondering the relationship between solar power and OER. ”, “How can you sell OER if they’re free?”, ”, and “If OER are free, why would anyone pay you?” Of course, I could have stopped everything else in my life for a few months and learned most of what I needed to know to answer these questions myself. OER are a lot like sunlight. Sunlight and OER are free.
eSchool News
SEPTEMBER 6, 2018
As schools and districts try to reduce textbook costs and digitize instructional resources, one of the struggles many teachers have is finding good repositories of open education resources (OER). The first step is to know how to access OER resources. Accessing OER. Department of Education has its #GoOpen District Launch Packet , and Open Learning has a free online course (about 15 hours) on how to develop OER content. How to find OER.
Edsurge
OCTOBER 11, 2018
Regardless of where you stand on the debate over open educational resources, you’re probably wondering: Does OER actually improve learning outcomes? At least, that was one of the main takeaways from a short session led by Phillip Grimaldi, director of research at OpenStax, a nonprofit OER initiative out of Rice University. The problem is, the research today treats OER like any other intervention and we expect it to impact all students,” he said.
Iterating Toward Openness
APRIL 29, 2016
Earlier this week I read an op-ed – sponsored by Pearson – titled “If OER is the answer, what is the question?” OER often shine in their variety and ability to deepen resources for niche topics. While it’s possible to build a complete course from OER, the finished product often lacks the scaffolding found in courseware authored by single author/editorial/product teams. T = the fraction of those people with Time available to work on OER.
Edsurge
JUNE 16, 2020
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.
Doug Levin
FEBRUARY 21, 2016
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. I’m deeply grateful for the support and collegiality of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation over this time, including for allowing me to attend this year’s annual OER meeting. This is where context matters most for the OER movement.
Iterating Toward Openness
AUGUST 27, 2019
As the movement grew and more people began advocating for the adoption of OER in place of traditionally copyrighted materials in classes, some advocates chose to make cost the primary focus of their advocacy. Materials that were openly licensed and free were the OER we had spent the last decade advocating for. As the above diagram shows, ZTC and OER advocates share common ground (green above), but also have important differences driven by their primary priorities.
Iterating Toward Openness
APRIL 25, 2019
I spend most of my time doing fairly tactical thinking and working focused on moving OER adoption forward in the US higher education space. I made what was probably the clearest statement of my vision for the future of learning materials in my Shuttleworth Fellowship application several years ago: My long-term goal is to create a world where OER are used pervasively throughout primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools. Now, make no mistake – OER is a means, not an end.
Iterating Toward Openness
MARCH 11, 2020
In the first installment on Monday, I explained how a fundamental failure to understand copyright makes the definition of OER in the new UNESCO recommendation nonsensical. The search for a model that will reliably sustain OER initiatives over the long-term has been underway for over 20 years.
ProfHacker
AUGUST 26, 2016
Suzan has recently defended her doctoral dissertation on open participants’ experiences in a massive open online course. When we look at common definitions of Open Educational Resources or OERs (e.g., OER Commons , The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ) it is clear that there is tendency to equate open educational resources to open educational materials and tools , such as course materials in text, audio, or video format, open textbooks, and educational software.
Iterating Toward Openness
NOVEMBER 18, 2019
There would be huge benefits to the OER ecosystem if we made similar arguments with commercial publishers, helping them understand why switching to an OER model would be good for their business. Why Commercial Publishers Should Switch to an OER Model. And a switch to OER would help publishers solve both of them. The harsh business reality for publishers is that they are competing in a world increasingly filled with OER. A switch to OER makes that happen.
Iterating Toward Openness
JUNE 22, 2016
Heather’s post is reacting to this quote from an article she read recently: “There is one additional requirement for widespread OER adoption. If you believe that open educational resources are public goods , which they appear to be since they are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, then it can be hard to avoid bringing the rest of that conceptual framework (including the idea of the free rider problem ) to your thinking about OER.
Iterating Toward Openness
JUNE 14, 2016
In case you didn’t see it elsewhere, I’m republishing the press release from Achieving the Dream about the incredibly exciting OER Degrees work that launched today. OER Degree Initiative will accelerate use of openly licensed learning materials in higher education and cut costs to students while improving degree and certificate completion. The effort is intended to spark more rapid adoption of OER within higher education, beginning with community colleges.
Iterating Toward Openness
JANUARY 31, 2020
I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. I’ve been writing about continuous improvement in the context of OER for a few years now. A Framework for the Continuous Improvement of OER.
Iterating Toward Openness
NOVEMBER 8, 2017
These are purchasing programs in which “institutions are signing up whole classes of students to automatically receive digital course materials at a discounted rate, rather than purchasing individually.” The inclusive access model’s goal of reducing the cost of textbooks apparently reminded the article’s author of OER, because she includes some discussion of OER toward the end of the article.
Iterating Toward Openness
JANUARY 24, 2017
Five years ago, in an essay called 2017: RIP OER? , I pondered whether this year would be the end of OER. To the best of my knowledge there is no one really working on next gen OER – OER that are interactive, simulative, really rich with multimedia AND combined with OAR [open assessment resources] that drive diagnosis, remediation, and adaptation. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER. Much has been written about 2012 being “the year of OER.”
Iterating Toward Openness
OCTOBER 14, 2015
I believe we’re seeing this same effect across OER adoptions, and have labeled it the Remix Hypothesis. The availability of these data enable truly objective, head-to-head comparisons of OER and commercial products, and set the stage for conversations about students’ academic return on investment in course materials. That’s a fight I know OER can win. It’s also why OER effectiveness research needs to be putting its very best foot forward.
Iterating Toward Openness
DECEMBER 20, 2018
At the OpenEd Conference in 2013, Nicole Allen and I challenged the OER community to save students one billion dollars. As a brief summary, part of the data collection involved sampling the prices for required course materials across a range of material formats, including new print, used print, print rental, digital rental, and loose-leaf. The overall average price for all OER (both OER Only and OER Hybrid) is $17.32. The adoption rate of OER is 6.3%.
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