Teaching and learning resources freely available through a creative commons license, OERs are in the public domain and can be customized for the learner. OERs are peer-reviewed, provide diversity to curriculum, and help reduce the cost of education by eliminating fees related to textbooks and licenses. Due to all these benefits, it is no surprise that OERs are gaining popularity in higher education.
1. What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
2. How do OER help educators and students?
Open educational resources give educators the ability to adapt instructional resources to the individual needs of their students, to ensure that resources are up to-date, and to ensure that cost is not a barrier to accessing high-quality standards aligned resources.
3. What is the difference between ‘free’ and ‘open’ resources?
Open educational resources are and always will be free in digital form, but not all free resources are OER. Free resources may be temporarily free or may be restricted from use at some time in the future (including by the addition of fees to access those resources). Moreover, free resources which may not be modified, adapted or redistributed without express permissions from the copyright holder are not OER.
4. Are all OER digital?
Like most educational resources these days, most OER are “born” digital. But like traditional resources, they can be made available to students in both digital and printed formats (including in the form of a traditional ‘textbook’). Of course, digital OER are easier to share, modify, and redistribute, but being digital is not what makes something an OER or not.
5. How do I know if an educational resource is an OER?
The key distinguishing characteristic of OER are its intellectual property license and the freedoms the license grants to others to share and adapt it. If a lesson plan or activity is not clearly tagged or marked as being in the public domain or having an open license, it is not OER. It’s that simple. While custom copyright licenses can be developed to facilitate the development and use of OER, often it can be easier to apply free-to-use standardized licenses developed specifically for that purpose, such as those developed by Creative Commons or – for software – those approved by the Open Source Initiative.
To be considered an OER, educational material has to have five Rs permission:
1. Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
2. Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
3. Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
4. Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
5. Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
6. Where can I find them?
You can find open images on Pixabay, Flickr and Wikimedia Commons; remember to check the license conditions! You can find other OER, including textbooks, courses and learning objects, in repositories like BC campus Sol*r, OER Commons, Merlot and OpenStax.
7. If they are free to use, are there issues with quality?
The OER that you find in repositories such as BC Campus Sol*r, OER Commons, and have been peer reviewed. Research generally indicates no significant differences in learning outcomes between students using traditional publisher material and those using OER. In a large study comparing 5000 US students using OER with 11000 students using publisher material in a range of disciplines, Fischer, Hilton, Robinson, & Wiley (2015) concluded: “In three key measures of student success—course completion, final grade of C- or higher, course grade– students whose faculty chose OER generally performed as well or better than students whose faculty assigned commercial textbooks” (p. 168).
Creative Commons is an organization that has developed a series of licenses to govern the use of intellectual material:
BY: you need to provide author attribution.
SA: you need to share the resources under the same conditions as the material you are using.
NC: non-commercial; you cannot use the resource for commercial purposes.
ND: no derivatives; for example, you cannot take a short story and turn it into a poem. Since you cannot revise the content, any item with ND is not an OER.
For more information on these licenses visit Creative Commons.
For more information on the public domain, visit the following website: UBC Public domain.
References
Creative Commons Public Domain Mark by Creative Commons, available in the public domain at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Mark#/media/File:Cc public_domain_mark_white.svg
[Creative commons licenses] by progressor, available under a pixabay license at https://pixabay.com/vectors/creative-commons-licenses-icons-by-783531/
Defining the “Open” in Open Content and Open Educational Resources, available under a CC BY license at https://opencontent.org/definition/. This material is based on original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.
Fischer, L., Hilton III, J., Robinson, T.J., & Wiley, D.A. (2015, December). A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 27, 3, 159-172, available at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12528-015-9101-x
Frequently Asked Questions by OER Commons, available under a CC BY license at https://www.oercommons.org/about#about-open-educational-resources. Originally adapted from “#GoOpen: OER for K-12 Educators” (www.tinyurl.com/GoOpen) by Doug Levin, also available under a CC BY license.
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