Open Educational Resources

In this Guide:

Introduction: Make Learning More Inclusive with OER

How can I get started with OER?

OER Licensing Information

Characteristics of High-Quality OER

Attributing OER Authors

OER Database

Additional Resources

Introduction: Make Learning More Inclusive with OER

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, our students spend an average of $1,400 on textbooks each year. Considering the cost of one 3-credit course for an Iowa resident at NICC is just over $500, our students are spending roughly the equivalent of an extra course each semester just on their textbooks. For a community college, where cost is a huge reason for enrollment, these costs are prohibitive to student success. If we continue in this manner, the high cost will result in lower retention and enrollment rates.

In addition to cost, accessibility is a growing concern with regard to print textbooks. Many students benefit from listening to their required readings, not just those with documented disabilities. NICC provides all students with the ReadSpeaker listening tool in our Brightspace LMS. But that tool is only as good as the documents uploaded to the platform.

While most publishers offer an electronic version of their texts, usually in the form of a PDF, those files are often still not accessible for students using screen reading tools. According to the College’s institutional accessibility report, “accessible” e-text versions of textbooks were only 33% accessible overall. This means that two thirds of our “accessible” textbook files do not actually meet basic accessibility standards, making them unreadable for the students who need them.

As NICC faculty, you have the power to fix this problem by replacing your high-cost, inaccessible texts with Open Educational Materials (OER).

The use of OER in college classrooms eliminates barriers to success related to cost, accessibility, equity, and currency of information, just to name a few. This article, "A Cover to Cover Solution: How Open Textbooks are the Path to Textbook Affordability" goes into much more detail about the positive student impact of OER.

Watch the testimonial to hear about an NICC instructor's experience using OER.

OER Make Learning More Inclusive

Switching to OER materials in your classroom is about more than cost and accessibility:

Textbook affordability: With textbook costs skyrocketing over the last few decades (at the rate of 3-4x Inflation and a 812% increase since 1978), faculty and students alike are looking for affordable alternatives.
Equal access to knowledge: OER have significant potential to help colleges through the sharing of our teaching resources.
Transformed teaching and learning: David Wiley defines OER Related Pedagogy as the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical when you have permission to engage in the 5R activities. You can view examples of these activities and read more about how open education can flip the classroom.
Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion: Instructors can create or adapt materials that promote inclusion through the use of diverse images, examples, perspectives, and worldviews that more readily reflect the lives of today’s students.
Increased retention and student success: Students can access materials on the first day of class or prior to, eliminating the need to borrow from classmates, illegally download, or drop courses due to an inability to afford materials. Additionally, research shows that students using OER perform the same or better than with a traditional textbook.

So, What Exactly are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials available in a variety of formats such as textbooks, courses, journals, multimedia and more. These resources fall under flexible open licensing and are accessible for anyone to use at no cost. They are usually available on the web, and tend to meet or exceed basic accessibility standards.

There has been a big push for the use of OER in recent years, and especially since the COVID-19 pandemic shed light on many issues with harder-to-access course materials, but OER are not new. The concept started becoming popular in the U.S. in the late '90s.

How can I get started with OER?

To get started, browse the content below. The Iowa OER Toolkit and the OER Handbook for Educators 1.0 are also great resources.

For help finding, implementing and aligning OER to your course guides, please contact the Department of Instructional Innovation and Design (DIID) at online@nicc.edu. The NICC library is also a great resource for help finding OER.

OER Licensing Information

OER are made available under open licenses, which grant permission to use them within the terms of those licenses. In this guide, we focus on Creative Commons, which is the most popular open licensing system.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of a copyrighted work. Creators use CC licenses when they want to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. The licenses also protect the people who use or redistribute that creator’s work from concerns of copyright infringement, as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license.

Creative Common Licenses

There are seven main Creative Commons licenses. Each license grants users permission to use works in specific ways. In order from most open to least open, the Creative Commons licenses are as follows:

CC0 (Public Domain): The creator of the work has waived their copyright, and the work is considered in the public domain. These works can be used without asking permission, and do not legally require attribution (although it is considerate to provide one and give credit to the author.)
CC BY (Attribution): You can share and modify the work, even if you use it for commercial purposes, as long as you provide proper attribution.
CC BY SA (Attribution-ShareAlike): You can share and modify the work, even if you use it for commercial purposes, as long as you provide proper attribution. If you change the work in any way, you must make your version available under the same license.
CC BY NC (Attribution-NonCommercial): You can share and modify the work, as long as you do not use it for commercial purposes. You must provide proper attribution.
CC BY NC SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike): You can share and modify the work, as long as you do not use it for commercial purposes. You must provide proper attribution. If you change the work in any way, you must make your version available under the same license.

Characteristics of High-Quality OER

Along with being able to search for OER and evaluate their quality, comes the skill to recognize OER with good characteristics. This improves with experience – that is, the more experience you get in searching for relevant OER materials the better you will get at being able to recognize OER materials with good characteristics. Characteristics of a good OER include:

Clear adoption of Creative Commons license (or other forms of license) and/or a clause that addresses how the OER material should be used.
Easy adaptation to suit different learning needs.
Quality content with reliable referencing (from a reliable source).
Recommended by experts and other members of the community.

The importance of recognizing OER materials with good characteristics lies in deliberately selecting OER materials from a pool of OER materials. This is a process that is relatively subjective to your needs. For instance, a video would be the best option if you wish to teach hands-on skills in using the Internet. The video would allow students to self-pace their learning as they actually use the Internet. Alternatively, an open access textbook and journal articles would be the best option if you are looking for materials that serve as a reference text to supplement the students’ learning. The following information provides some tips in selecting OER materials with relevance to your needs.

To see the characteristics of OERs as described by Wikipedia: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources#Characteristics

Attributing OER Authors

An attribution is an acknowledgment of the work’s original creator.

Other than the Public Domain license, all Creative Commons licenses require an attribution when you use works to which they apply, unless the creator says otherwise. The attribution should appear with the work, in a manner that is reasonable for the medium (e.g. on a credits list on a website, or a credits slide in a video).

CC Licenses have flexible standards for attribution, so there is not an exact format to follow, however, you need to include the important information. Use the technique below as a best practice when building your own attributions.

Creating an Attribution

Title: What is the name of the material?
Author: Who owns the material? (Include the link)
Source: Where can I find it? (The URL of the original work)
License: What specific license is the work under? (Include the link)

A typical attribution would look like this: “Title by Author is licensed under CC License Type.” Each element of the attribution links to the relevant page: the title links to the source page, the author’s name links to their profile page, and the license type links to the license page. e.g. “Donuts” by Ferry Sitompul is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

If the creator has specific attribution instructions, structure your attribution in the way that they specify. If there is a copyright notice for the material, you must keep it intact and include it in the attribution, e.g. "This document contains content adapted from the Autodesk® Maya® Help, available under CC BY NC SA 3.0. Copyright © Autodesk, Inc."

Creating an Attribution if You Modified the Work

When you modify content to create something new, you have created something called a derivative work. In addition to the original attribution, the attribution for your derivative work requires the following additional information:

The title of the new work.
That it is a derivative of the original.
The license under which you are sharing your work (some licenses require you to use the same as the original).
Your name.

An attribution for a derivative work would look like this: This work, “New Title” is a derivative of “Title” by Author and used under CC License Type. “New Title” is licensed under CC License Type by My Name.

E.g. This work, “Donut Faces”, is a derivative of “Donuts” by Ferry Sitompul, and is licensed under CC BY 2.0. “Donut Faces” is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0 by AC Library.

Additional Help

Best practices for attribution (Creative Commons): These guidelines provide examples of good attributions and information about attribution in specific media.
Open Attribution Builder: Easily create proper attributions for work that you have used under the Creative Commons Licensing.

OER Database

There are many places where you can find quality OERs for your courses. We've put together an OER database to help you get started. You can find more by searching online, or contact the NICC library for assistance with OER research. Click here to access the OER database.

Additional Resources

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