OER
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 sharing, accessing, repurposing including for commercial purposes and collaborating with others.
What are the benefits?
Creating and using OER may improve student persistence because the materials can be tailored to their current needs and interests; increase student use of online tools; encourage educators to collaborate and share; save costs; and serve as a model for lifelong learning.
What can we use?
Knowing the types of Creative Commons licenses and respecting the licensed material means you are using OER correctly and responsibly. Registering your own work helps others know how you are comfortable with it being shared.
For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses
How can we use?
Another way to think about OER is through the Five R Framework, developed by David Wiley. It supports a deeper understanding of what it means to consider an object (i.e., resource) an OER.
1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
2. Reuse – the right to reuse the content as verbatim or in its unaltered form
3. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new
5. Redistribute – the right to make and share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others
OER in Action
Classroom Scenario You are teaching English Language Arts to GED students. Some students are struggling to learn vocabulary and text structure so you decide to provide them with supplemental materials.
While searching for materials, you find an almost perfect OER. However, you do not feel the directions are clear enough and you do not want the students to struggle, since the material is already challenging. You rewrite the directions because it is an OER.
Another problem you notice is that the text is very small and close together. Since the resource is an OER, you enlarge the text size, increase spacing between sentences so the material is less intimidating to students, and then add a text box with lines so students can take notes while they read.
You have revised (refined directions, increased text size and added spacing, and added a text box for note taking) the lesson to support student needs.
Where can we find?
OER to use:
OER Commons www.oercommons.org
Merlot www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
Creative Commons Search http://search.creativecommons.org
National Science Digital Library https://nsdl.oercommons.org/
To create and remix:
OER Commons Open Author www.oercommons.org/open-author-about
Gooru Learning https://www.gooru.org
WikiEducator wikieducator.org/
Open Tapestry www.opentapestry.com/
TedEd http://ed.ted.com
Based on material with CC-BY license found at https://oercommons.org/courses/oer-fact-sheet