A Quick Guide to Open Education
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Abbey K. Elder
This chapter was adapted from The OER Starter Kit by Abbey K. Elder, licensed CC BY 4.0. The sections on Licensing and Public Domain were adapted from UH OER Training by Billy Meinke, licensed CC BY 4.0.
There are many practices, theories, and tools that you’ll need to learn about to manage an OER program effectively at your institution. However, before broader discussions around pedagogy, innovation, and support structures begin, most institutions start by exploring the idea of utilizing open educational resources (OER) in their courses. To provide a foundation for the discussions surrounding OER throughout the rest of this book, this chapter will introduce the basics, focusing on definitions, foundational components, and open licensing for OER.
What is an Open Educational Resource?
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) defines OER as:
“teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by the use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt, and share the resource—anytime, anywhere.”
This definition has a few key components, but in most contexts, it can be broken down into two major requirements: the freedom for anyone to access a piece of content, and the freedom to adapt that content without needing to contact the copyright holder for permissions.
The Variety of OER
Because the term “teaching, learning, and research resources,” can comprise a wide variety of materials, the OER your instructors utilize may come in many forms. To showcase this diversity, let’s explore the material types available to filter in the popular OER repository, OER Commons:
- Activities & Assignments: labs, homework, and assessments
- Class Guides: syllabi and student guides
- Courseware: lectures, modules, and full courses
- Instructor Materials: lesson plans and teaching strategies
- Mixed Media: illustrations, games, videos, podcasts, simulations, and interactive materials
- Reading Materials: case studies, data sets, lecture notes, primary sources, textbooks, and other readings
Since textbooks are often seen as the ubiquitous “course material” in discussions about the need for free, open content in education, it is no surprise that open textbooks are often seen as the default OER. However, it is important, especially as an OER program manager, to remember that there are a lot of options available for faculty looking to incorporate OER into their courses. Furthermore, thanks to their open nature, OER can be adopted, adapted, or remixed to fit your faculty members’ needs. This may include moving an OER into a new format, like taking a largely text-based OER and adding interactive elements, or making a video out of a set of open lecture slides.
The Freedoms of OER
One of the most popular aspects of an OER is the fa