OER 101 for Faculty

You might have heard the term 'open educational resources' (OER) at conferences, committee meetings, or teaching workshops around campus. This post will highlight some of the key 'whats & whys' of OER for faculty. Read on to learn more about OER basics!

WHAT's AN OER?
OER can exist in a variety of ways. They might be a textbook, a lesson plan, a test bank, or an educational video. However, for a teaching resource to be an OER, it needs to be licensed in such a way that anyone can freely access, download, reuse, and even revise the content.

Licensing permissions for OER are guided by the 5R framework:

• Retain: users of the content have the right to make, own, and control copies of an OER

• Reuse: the content can be reused in many ways such as for a lecture, a course reading, or personal study

• Revise: the OER can be adapted and modified by users

• Remix: the original or revised OER content can be combined with other open educational resources to create a new teaching tool (i.e. textbook, module)

• Redistribute: users have the right to share the original content or remixes and revisions of it with others (Wiley, n.d.)

One of the most important takeaways from the 5R framework is that an OER needs to be not only free, but also licensed so it allows for other faculty, students, and the general public to rework the content for their specific needs. So while free resources like a TED talk can be time-savers for faculty, they still don't provide you with the necessary permissions to revise the content to better meet the learning outcomes of your course (STEM Open Educational Resources for Adult Education, n.d.).

The Creative Commons licensing framework provides a great starting point for ensuring an educational resource is not just freely available for people to use, but also allows for remixing and revising of the content.

WHY USE OER IN HIGHER EDUCATION?
The following video (Mireles, 2012) highlights the powerful impact a fully open course can have on learning in a global context:

While you might not be interested in creating a fully open course, you can still use some of the resources from an open course for your own teaching. For example, using an open textbook provides the following benefits:

• Zero to low-cost textbooks for your students: Textbook costs have continued to grow at a drastic pace for North American students; however, research shows that students are opting out of purchasing the required textbook or even deciding to not enrol in courses that use prohibitively expensive texts (Jhangiani & Jhangiani, 2017). An open textbook, however, provides your students with access to the course readings they need on the first day of classes.

• The ability to revise/rework content for your course's needs: Have you ever wanted to make changes to sections in a textbook you use for teaching? Perhaps update the content or add more local examples that students will better identify with? Well, open textbooks and other OER provide you with the licensing permissions you need to revise and rework course content. For example, the CORE Econ textbook is an OER that was developed in 2008 around the time of the Great Recession. Faculty found that other economics books didn't cover the crisis appropriately and over twenty academics came together to develop a better resource that would also be freely available to students, as well as other faculty members that would want to revise the content (Cassidy, 2017).

While there are many more reasons to explore the use of OER in the classroom, hopefully you have a better understanding of why these resources matter and how they differ from free, but not open resources. To keep on learning more about OER, check out York University's guide that highlights what OER are and where to find them!

References

Cassidy, J. (2017, September 11). A new way to learn economics. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/a-new-way-to-learn-economics

Jhangiani, R. S., & Jhangiani, S. (2017). Investigating the perceptions, use, and impact of open textbooks: A survey of post-secondary students in British Columbia. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(4). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i4.3012

Mireles, N [Nadia Mireles]. (2012, June 5). Open education matters: Why is it important to share content? [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTNnxPcY49Q

STEM Open Educational Resources for Adult Education. (n.d.). Open educational resources (OER):
A fact sheet for adult education. Retrieved from https://lincs.ed.gov/sites/default/files/OER_Fact_Sheet_508.pdf

Wiley, D. (n.d.). Defining the "open" in open content and open educational resources. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/definition/

This blog post, authored by Stephanie Quail,

is  available under a CC BY 4.0 international license