3 The Basics
The first two chapters introduced us to OER and how to license and use existing material and resources.[1] This unit will explore practices of creating and sharing OER so they can have the biggest impact and be used without any legal or technical barriers.
Why It Matters
A big part of any educator’s work is preparing, updating, and combining learning materials. Making those materials open requires just a few additional steps, and it’s easier than you think. What are those steps? What should you consider and expect when you want to create and publish your resources in the open?
When we share our education resources as OER, we share our best practices, our expertise, our challenges and solutions. Education is about sharing. When we share our work with more people, we become better educators.
Learning Outcomes
- Conceptualize how our OER will work in practice
- Understand how to select a CC license(s) for your resources.
- Examine your open license decision for compatibility (i.e., can it be remixed) with other OER.
- Identify needs and challenges to improving OER accessibility for everyone.
Personal Reflection: Why it Matters to You?
What kind of learning resources do you create now? Are you already publishing and sharing these resources with others for feedback? Which of your resources do you think could benefit fellow educators, learners, libraries or scientists? If you choose to share, how much freedom do you give to others to reuse or borrow from your work; what permissions will you allow for others to reuse your work?
Acquiring Essential Knowledge
Why share?
For an introduction on why it is important to share your work as OER, watch this video (time 03:51):
Because educators and librarians can share OER with everyone for near zero cost[2], we should. After all, education is fundamentally about sharing knowledge and ideas. Libraries are about archiving, sharing, and helping learners find the knowledge they seek. When we license our work and resources under a Creative Commons license, we are sharing that work with the public under simple, legal permissions. Sharing your work expressly with the intention for others to use and share, is a great service and gift to the world.
Choosing a CC license for OER
Creative Commons has a suite of six open copyright licenses. Creative Commons fully support authors’ selection and use of any of the CC licenses or public domain tools. However, not all education materials available under a CC license are true OER. Some CC licenses are more restrictive than others in how they’re created and shared. Review this chart that details which CC licenses work well for education resources and which do not.
The two CC No Derivatives (ND) licenses are not technically OER-compatible licenses because they do not allow the public to revise or remix the education resource. Because the ND licenses do not meet the 5Rs or any of the major OER definitions, the open education movement does not consider ND-licensed educat