Introduction to Open Educational Resources
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
- Define “open” in the context of open educational resources (OER).
- Relate the concepts of “open” and OER to your personal instructional practice
- Explain the difference between OER and other free educational materials.
- Describe the potential benefits of OER for instructors, for students, and for SAIT
This chapter will introduce you to the concept of OER and the benefits and challenges of using them.
Attribution: “Open Educational Resources: What and Why [Youtube]” by Jason Hardwick is available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.
Background
The open education movement was originally inspired by the open source software community, with a focus on broadening access to information through the use of free, open content. OER has always been a grassroots initiative, with many individuals and organizations contributing to its development. One of the first major initiatives was MIT’s OpenCourseWare Iniative, founded in 2001 . As Bliss & Smith (2017) explain in their breakdown of the history of open education:
Much of our attention focused on OER’s usefulness at providing knowledge in its original form to those who otherwise might not have access. The implicit goal was to equalize access to disadvantaged and advantaged peoples of the world – in MIT’s language, to create ‘a shared intellectual Common.’[1]
However, OER is not an exclusively North American movement, as can be seen from the timeline of OER events below. For example, significant growth occurred after the UNESCO Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries convened in 2002. In part, the final declaration at the forum stated that participants “expressed their… wish to develop together a universal educational resource available for the whole of humanity, to be referred to henceforth as Open Educational Resources.”[2]
Dig Deeper To learn more about the history of OER, review: A Brief History of Open Educational Resource and OER – A Historical Perspective.
Following the rise of open education in the early 2000s, growing interest in open courseware (particularly open textbooks) catapulted the movement to new heights; however, the movement toward greater OER awareness among instructors is growing at a slow and steady rate. A survey done in the U.S. in 2018 indicated that 47% of instructors had never heard of OER, while the remaining instructors had some degree of familiarity with the concept. There is still quite a large number of instructors who are unaware of OER, but the percentage has shrunk by 19% since 2014, showing that awareness is growing. [3]
What is an OER?
The most comprehensive definition of OER available today is provided by the Hewlett Foundation:
Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under