Module 1: What is OER

Why Open Education?

When it comes to the "why" for open education, the answer always comes back to students. The commonly-cited reason for open education is around the cost barriers to accessing a quality education. This is an important consideration, surely, but there are myriad reasons beyond financial savings that make open education worth advocating for.

Four minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc2ovlU9Ndk

The Case for Open Education

Textbook costs should not be a barrier to education

The price of textbooks has skyrocketed more than three times the rate of inflation for decades. College students face steep price tags that can top $200 per book, and K-12 schools use books many years out of date because they are too expensive to replace. Using OER solves this problem because the material is free online, affordable in print, and can be saved forever. Resources that would otherwise go to purchasing textbooks can be redirected toward technology, improving instruction, or reducing debt.

Students learn more when they have access to quality materials

The rapidly rising cost of textbooks in higher education has left many students without access to the materials they need to succeed. Numerous studies have documented that students who use OER do as well or better than those using traditional materials. OER also create important opportunities to meet the needs of diverse learners, including improving cultural relevance and making modifications to meet the needs of students of all abilities.

In total, 7,779 students have utilized OER materials across the ten studies that attempted to measure results pertaining to student efficacy … the use of OER was sometimes correlated with higher test scores and lower failure or withdrawal rates. None of the nine studies that measured efficacy had results in which students who utilized OER performed worse than their peers who used traditional textbooks. (Robinson, Fischer, Wiley, & Hilton, 2014).

Technology holds boundless potential to improve teaching and learning

Open Education ensures that teachers, learners and institutions can fully explore this potential. Imagine an American History textbook with the latest news from the run-up to the 2022 election, or a math tutorial that incorporates local landmarks into word problems. Imagine a lecture attended by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, or a peer-to-peer exchange between Canadian students learning Mandarin with Chinese students learning English or French. All of this and more is possible when the pathways for technology in education are fully open.

Better education means a better future

Education is the key to advancing society’s greatest goals, from  building a strong economy to leading healthy lives. By increasing access to education and creating a platform for more effective teaching and learning, Open Education benefits us all.

Open education gives educators and learners control over content

Using OER can enable educators to become more involved and invested in teaching and learning practice. "Most open licenses permit instructors to create customized versions of the textbook for use in their own classroom.  For example, an instructor could remove unwanted chapters, change notations, or insert their own sections and examples. Instructors can distribute their customized versions online, or have them printed for students by the bookstore or a local copy shop." (Fasimpaur, 2015)

Many open textbooks also come with ancillary resources like test banks and quizzes. The flexibility of open licensing allows educators to create supplementary materials for open textbooks which can link back to the texts themselves, something which would be considerably more difficult with the proprietary nature of traditional textbooks. An example of this process in action is the OpenStax Hub available through OER Commons, where educators can create and share educational resources designed to supplement specific textbooks available from OpenStax.

Open education supports true academic freedom

The ability to adapt, update, and remix OER enables a new way of practicing academic freedom for faculty and instructional staff of all disciplines. Under a traditional model, teachers are encouraged to “follow the textbook” and therefore don’t have a lot of room to set their own pace or collate the content of their courses from various sources (Fasimpaur, 2015). Open licenses put the control of education back in the hands of faculty, researchers, instructional designers, students. Open licensing allows for a community to grow: faculty can engage a broader spectrum of their peers in the creation, review, and revision process.

What is Open Education?

Two minute video: youtube.com/watch?v=LDTCdMKlDQw

Education is essential to advancing society. It's how we pass down the wealth of human knowledge and equip the next generation of leaders, innovators and productive members of society. Our educational systems are built with the goal of providing every person the opportunity to build a better life--by turning children into citizens, learners into teachers, laborers into skilled workers.

Open Education Defined

Open education stems from the fact that expanding educational opportunities is more possible now than it has ever been before. Through the Internet, learners can find information instantly on virtually any topic, teachers can share their knowledge with students on another continent almost as easily as in their own classroom, and educational materials can be disseminated to a worldwide audience at virtually no marginal cost.

Open Education encompasses educational resources, tools and practices that can be freely and fully used in the digital environment without legal, financial or technical barriers. The meaning of "open" is typically defined in terms of users being able to freely exercise the five "R" rights: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute (more on the Five Rs below).

Open Education is the realization of everything education can be in today's world: where teachers, learners and members of society can leverage all of the new pathways offered by technology to create and share knowledge together. This can start as small as a student using open resources to enrich her education, or become as large as an entire university that offers courses openly online to the entire world.

Pillars of Open Education

Open Education is a broad movement that applies differently across the world. In the context of higher education institutions, it is useful to think about Open Education in terms of three main pillars:

• Open Educational Resources - Open educational resources (OER) are the foundation upon which Open Education is built. OER are defined as educational materials that are distributed at no cost with legal permission for the public to freely use, share, and build upon the content. OER include open textbooks, lecture videos, presentation slides, assessments, software, articles, and any other kind of content published online and shared openly with the world. These resources are either in the public domain or carry an open license granting legal permission for their use, and can be used on a variety of software platforms, learning management systems, and in print.

• Open Educational Practices - Open Educational Practices (OEP) are teaching techniques that leverage the "open" nature of OER and open technologies to facilitate learning. This may include open pedagogy where students participate in the creation or improvement of OER, "flipped classroom" models where students watch open video lectures to free up class time for discussion, or online courses taught openly so that anyone with an internet connection can participate.

• Open Educational Policy - Open Educational Policy refers to policy frameworks that support, encourage and remove barriers to Open Education. This encompasses all levels of policy from the Federal government to individual academic departments, and may include mission statements, human resource policy, intellectual property policy, professional development programs, resource allocation decisions, and sustainability models.

The Five Rs of Open

The "Five Rs" is a widely adopted framework defining what makes educational material open. Users must be able to engage in the Five Rs freely and with permission.

• RETAIN - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content.

• 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).

• REVISE - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language).

• REMIX - the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup).

• 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).

Defining OER

OER unleash the use of content; they are freely distributed online under a "some rights reserved" (as opposed to "all rights reserved") copyright license that grants blanket permission to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute the content. Unlike 'closed' e-textbooks, users can engage with OER content in the myriad ways possible in the digital environment—copying, mixing, matching, sharing, printing, editing, and more.

"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. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge" (Hewlett Foundation, n.d.).

A 2007 report published by UNESCO's Virtual University identifies several characteristics of ideal OER. While aspirational, this list can help provide a guiding star for OER creators and practitioners.

• The license under which an OER is released should mention precisely what is authorized in terms of adaptation and re-use.
• OER should be published in a format that everyone can open, copy and paste from, and edit content in, without needing to install proprietary software.
• To be easily re-usable, OER should be released in small chunks, or be easily separable into smaller chunks.
• OER should be easy to search for and find. This means that resources should be described using standards-compliant metadata, to enable federated searching across a variety of search tools.
• OER should be efficient (i.e., well-designed and of high quality) for teaching and learning.

What are my OER options?

When you're looking at options for using OER in your course, you have a few options: you can choose to adopt materials as-is, adapt materials to better meet your needs, or create new materials to share openly with other instructors. These will be discussed in future modules.

Adopt - If there are high-quality, vetted Open Educational Resources available on the topic your course covers, and you do not feel the need to edit or otherwise alter them for use in your course, you might consider adopting them for use "as is." Adopting is the simplest way or including OER in your course, and the least time-intensive. 

Adapt - If there are OER available on the topic your course covers, but they are dated, too broad, or contain information which is beyond the scope of your course, you may want to consider adapting the materials. After checking that the Creative Commons license (more on this in Module 5) attached to the materials allows for adaptation, you may choose to edit the materials to tailor them to your course. 

Alternately, if there are OER available on the topic your course covers, but no single resource is broad enough to cover the needs of your course, you may want to consider building an "OER course pack," a selection of various OER, free online materials, and websites which make up the resources for use in a course. Like traditional course packs, these sets of materials can be extremely versatile and adaptable for different uses.

Create - If there are no high-quality OER available on your topic or if you have course materials that you believe are superior to the OER available to you online, you may want to consider creating or licensing your own course materials. Creating Open Educational Resources can be as simple as openly licensing and sharing a syllabus you currently use or sharing lesson plans on OER repositories like OER Commons.

Discussion Question

Please respond to the following question by Friday, October 13 in the Module 1 Discussion channel (link opens in Teams).
1. Do you think that free, unrestricted, day-one access for students to your course materials could affect their retention and student success? Why or why not?

Attributions and Citations

Information in this module was adapted from SPARC Open Ed Primer, by the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program, published under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

"The 5 Rs of Open" is an adaptation of Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources, originally written by David Wiley and published freely under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

Robinson, T. J., Fischer, L., Wiley, D., & Hilton, J. (2014). The Impact of Open Textbooks on Secondary Science Learning Outcomes. Educational Researcher, 43(7), 341–351. http://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X14550275