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This project sought to study how much academic librarians who work with open educational resources (OERs) know about accessibility, as well as how they incorporate accessibility into the products of their work. A survey was sent out through email list services in spring 2020, and any librarian worldwide who works with OERs was invited to participate; 193 responded in full. Just under half of librarians said they always consider accessibility when working with faculty to create or adapt OERs, but fewer than a third said they consider accessibility a factor when adding OERs to their collections.
"UNESCO coined the term ‘OER‘ back in 2002 to describe an initiative intended to bring about educational resources that were universally accessible. Open Educational Resources are described as ‘learning, teaching, and research materials in any media, digital or otherwise, that belong to the public domain, or have been released under an open license permitting free access, use, and adaptation, as well as redistribution by others without restriction.’"
Via EDTECH@UTRGV
Open educational resources have gone global and may help make learning more accessible, equitable and inclusive around the world. So says the new Educause Horizon report, which identifies technologies and trends that are changing higher education. This year’s forecast was created by nearly five dozen higher education experts, a third of them from institutions outside of the U.S. OER was one of six “emerging technologies and practices” the panelists highlighted as most likely to significantly influence postsecondary teaching and learning in the future.
According to the Open Education Consortium, “sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: education is sharing knowledge, insights, and information with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, ideas, and understanding can be built." Whether they are purchased or freely acquired, librarians should be open to sharing their resources to everyone who wants to use them to enrich their lives through education. Open Education Resources (OER) include resources or tools that can be used and modified for free and without any legal or technical barriers, and when used properly can help foster a transparent culture of learning and engagement in our communities. In this webinar:
• Learn what Open Education Resources (OER) are and how they can be used to engender trust, generate rigorous learning opportunities, and potentially lead to smarter decision-making strategies.
• Discover a variety of OER and Open Access (OA) repositories to find accessible and authoritative resources, including textbooks, to use in curriculum.
• Acquire OER strategies for developing a variety of educational opportunities using a variety of formats.
•Understand various issues (e.g., GDPR) impacting OER in libraries.
You might find creating OERs to be much easier than you first anticipated. Or, you might already have materials you can share with the “right” licenses. From simply digitized materials to carefully staged video lectures, OERs can add a whole new dimension to your teaching. It can improve your teaching method, and it can also improve student performances. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can create OERs.
"Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OERs can be full courses, course materials, lesson plans, open textbooks, learning objects, videos, games, tests, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports access to knowledge.
2018 marks the 20th anniversary of open content. I’ll be writing a range of essays this year reflecting on two decades of work toward opening the core intellectual infrastructure of education (textbooks and other educational materials, assessments, and outcomes / objectives / competency statements) in order to increase access to and improve the effectiveness of education. This post, written as part of my agreement to keynote #OER18 later this spring, provides some historical context for the emergence of open content.
I don’t make any claim to objectivity here – this history is written wholly from my personal point of view. You may have seen it differently. That is the nature of history.
MOOCs and Open Educational Resources: A Handbook for Educators is being made available for university faculty, educators, and educational producers involved in produc - ing online courses. It is hoped that some utility may be found in its pages by all kinds of readers, whether one is a staff videographer or a chaired senior faculty member or a freelance video editor, or in any position around and in between.
This presentation by the Open.Michigan Team provides an introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER), shows several examples, and provides an overview for the Open.Michigan initiative. The presentation also demonstrates the steps involved in creating and sharing your own educational materials as OER.
Explore the world of free digital materials available through open licenses, and celebrate the four Rs: reuse, redistribute, revise, remix.
Open educational resources are free digital materials you can use with your students. Here are some ways to find them.
Via EDTECH@UTRGV
The concept of making college more accessible and affordable with open educational resources is taking off on campuses across the country. SPARC hosted a webcast on March 29 that featured four librarians who shared their experience in supporting OER in creative ways with students,faculty, and community members.
E-learning encompasses not only technology but also pedagogical and instructional strategies to configure a complete learning environment based on the Internet. E-learning is nowadays widely used in higher education as a mean for supporting learning on academic programs. Concurrently, the Open Educational Resources (OER) are becoming a valuable alternative to improve access to high-quality educational content released under open licenses by outstanding universities worldwide. The conjunction of both concepts can configure a strategy to improve the quality of the curricula in the higher education institutions, particularly in development countries, in order to equalize the learning outcomes of international academic programs and to reduce the cost associated with educational content development. This work aims to achieve a preliminary understanding of the potential of the OER availability to be used in E-learning environments. As a case study, we have conducted an exploration of the feasibility of using OER to supplement E-learning environments for Higher Education in Computer Science at Ecuador. The search of the OER suitable to be used for this purpose has been performed on all categories of OER websites, including Open Courseware projects of prestigious universities. Moreover, this paper highlights the main barriers as well as the opportunities derived from adopting OER in E-learning environments.
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What are the best dynamic, digital resources that can fit teachers’ unique instructional styles, align with district and state standards, and be personalized to meet students’ diverse learning needs? At Liberty Public Schools (LPS), we started asking this question over five years ago, and discovered an answer: open educational resources (OER). OER are openly licensed materials that are free for educators and students to use, customize, and share.
We intend this book to act as a guide writ large for would-be champions of OER, that anyone—called to action by the example set by our chapter authors—might serve as guides themselves. The following chapters tap into the deep experience of practitioners who represent a meaningful cross section of higher education institutions in North America. It is our hope that the examples and discussions presented by our authors will facilitate connections among practitioners, foster the development of best practices for OER adoption and creation, and more importantly, lay a foundation for novel, educational excellence.
Freely available, open education resources provide opportunities for college students to strengthen their critical thinking and quantitative literacy skills using sophisticated active-learning strategies. In a 2017 Wakefield market research survey, investigators found 85 percent of college students elected not to buy one or more required hard copy course textbooks. Students also are turning more frequently to their mobile devices to complete their coursework. Their reasons included the high price of textbooks and the fact that they did not value textbooks as learning tools. Instead, students are enticed by online course content, which can be accessed anywhere on campuses equipped with modern network infrastructures.
As schools and districts try to reduce textbook costs and digitize instructional resources, one of the struggles many teachers have is finding good repositories of open education resources (OER). The first step is to know how to access OER resources. However, access itself isn’t enough and the sheer volume of materials can be overwhelming. The second challenge is knowing how to curate or organize the materials you find into useful groups. The term curate comes from the museum world where for eons, curators gathered artifacts and arranged them to tell a compelling story or to otherwise educate.
Attention all teachers—veteran teachers especially. You have much of value to offer your students. You probably also have much of value to offer the teachers at your school. But what if you’re one of those teachers who also have much of value to offer the world of education at large?
If your students want to find free images for whatever awesome projects they’re working on, there are plenty of choices. That said, we’ve taken at least some of the guesswork out of that search with this post. Today we’re sharing 15 of the open source image resources that caught our eye recently.
More and more instructors are choosing open educational resources over traditional textbooks, a survey of more than 2,700 faculty members reveals.
The "Opening the Textbook" survey, published by the Babson Survey Research Group today, reports that the number of faculty members at two- and four-year institutions using OER as textbooks has nearly doubled in the last year -- from 5 percent in 2015-16 to 9 percent in 2016-17.
Awareness of OER -- openly licensed and freely accessible teaching and learning materials -- has also increased. Twenty-nine percent of faculty described themselves as "aware" or "very aware" of OER this year, up from 25 percent last year and 20 percent the year before. The proportion that reported they had never heard of OER fell from 66 percent in 2014-15 to 56 percent this year.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational material that are freely available for teachers and students to use, adapt, share, and reuse.
When it comes to the ‘Create’ part of the 7 Cs of Learning Design most course creators will create original content for the core of their course. However, it can be beneficial to incorporate ready made content from other sources rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.
Provided you respect any attached copyright and distribution restrictions, many educators are happy for their content to be shared to a broader audience.
Open Education Resources (OER) Commons is a platform that provides open access to a wide variety of open educational resources that are either in the public domain or are licensed under Creative Commons.
The idea that knowledge is power is not a new concept, however the idea that knowledge, resources, and information should be widely available and also free might be a slightly newer concept. Before the advancement of the internet and today’s technology, the idea of access to free information, teaching resources, and even online books was unheard of. If you wanted to learn about a topic, you could pay for the materials and or books to learn about your topic of interest. If you want to teach about a specific area, you needed to develop the materials yourself or pay for them. Many educators now believe that teaching materials and other information should be free. As we begin to share our resources as copyright free materials, we also open the idea globally that teaching, learning, and research materials should be accessible to everyone. Edutopia notes that open educational resources can also save teachers significant time, planning, energy, and resources.
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