Considerations for Using or Creating OER
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
- Assess your teaching materials for the potential to release as OER.
- Apply a backwards design approach when integrating OER into your course.
- List the key considerations to keep in mind before adopting an OER.
Transforming your course to include open educational resources can be as simple as switching one material for another or as radical as completely changing your teaching style. This chapter outlines some key considerations and questions you should ask yourself before adopting or creating OER.[1]
How will using OER improve your course?
When integrating OER into your course, you have the opportunity to critically evaluate your teaching methods and alter them to better meet your needs. Open education is a movement that supports innovative teaching. By using OER in a course, you are opening up new possibilities for greater diversification, multidisciplinary learning, and student engagement.
One way to go about this is to use backward design for your project.
Backward design is a framework for planning your course around its intended outcomes.[2] Backwards design is a way to solidify more abstract course outcomes, such as critical and creative thinking, in order to ensure that students are actively engaged with the material they are being taught. There are three stages to the backward design process:
- Identify desired results,
- Determine acceptable evidence, and
- Plan learning experiences and instruction.[3]
You might notice that this approach does not end with “create and/or curate educational content.” Instead, it ends with more planning. The purpose of backward design is not to be done with your course transformation in a quick 3-step process. Instead, it asks instructors to question the processes and materials they currently use and to start over by plotting out what is needed to meet your course outcomes.
Considerations: Impact
Thinking critically about the purpose of your course and its learning outcomes helps to ensure an excellent learning experience for your students. Ask yourself:
- What do I want my students to learn?
- How will I communicate to students that the concepts I present are valuable?
- How will I assess my students’ understanding of core concepts?
Who is your audience?
Once you’ve decided what you want students to learn, you are ready to think about what resources you can use. As you begin to look for OER for your course, it’s important to consider your target audience(s).
Considerations: Audience
- Do you have a primary audience? For example, majors or non-majors.
- Does your audience belong to a specific cultural or geographic background?
- Are there national, provincial, or local contexts that you want to incorporate into an OER?
Although your OER may be used by educators around the world, you can create it with your local audience in mind. Often times, culturally relevant examples allow students to engag