ACTIVITY:
Your students are completing a community project where they are asked to solve a community problem by presenting their idea to the city town council.
You are considering ways that students can document evidence of their learning and thinking so that others can see the process behind their project . Your school district has an ePortfolio software tool (closed to the public), but the students want to share their learning with the public.
Questions:
“Open licenses help grease the gears of collaboration by making it clear what you can and cannot do with the creative work of others.” - William Meinke
A common misconception about OER (Open Educational Resources) is that they are simply free resources. While free is one aspect, how the resource is licensed is equally important. For resources to be considered OER, they must be openly licensed. This means that the permissions traditionally protected by copyright are proactively communicated to users, frequently though not exclusively through the use of Creative Commons licenses.
Put simply, open licenses such as Creative Commons (CC) permit creators to retain copyright but tell others how they can use and adapt their work. Advocates of OER frequently discuss open licensing in the context of the "5 R" activities, i.e. an open license is one that gives users permissions to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and/or Redistribute the content.
At the core of nearly all CC licenses is the Attribution (BY) component, requiring all who reuse your work to provide full attribution to you. Additional terms can be combined into Creative Commons licenses so that you can share your work with different conditions for reuse.
In addition to Attribution (BY), the three other CC licensing options are:
These options can be combined (as shown below) when you create a specific CC license in order to allow/restrict specific forms of reuse of your work by others. Licenses shown at the top of the spectrum are the most open; licenses at the bottom are the most restrictive.
Creative Commons license spectrum CC BY 4.0 Shaddim via Wikimedia Commons
Creative Commons license information is often displayed in the caption of an image or the footer of a webpage. You can see examples of this in the captions of the two images used in this guide and in the footer at the end of the guide.
References & Resources
Open Educational Resources (OER) are resources made available for others to use to support learning. OER vary enormously in granularity and form. Individual OER might include specific learning activities, assessments, full courses, textbooks, journal articles, software, datasets, images, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support learning.
The ‘open’ in OER means that the resources are not only free of cost but also come with reuse rights, typically granted through an open copyright license such as Creative Commons.
Assigning an open license to a resource allows others to engage with that resource in ways that are not otherwise allowed (due to copyright restrictions). From simply correcting typos or grammatical errors to more involved activities such as updating the content for local contexts (disciplinary, institutional or geographic) or adding up-to-date research, OER allow educators to adapt and tailor educational materials as they wish.
As an example, the two images used in this guide are open educational resources, repurposed for use in the guide. In addition, the guide itself is an OER, which you can use and repurpose as you wish, in your teaching or otherwise.
References & Resources
Finding OER
Creative Commons search - enter search term
Unsplash (images) - all content licensed CC0; simply enter search term
Flickr (images) - enter search term & then select ‘All Creative Commons’ under license option
Google advanced search:
OER Repositories - search various OER repositories to find appropriate resources
Open textbooks - e.g. OpenStax, Open Textbook Library, BC Open Textbooks; LibreTexts. See also A guide to making open textbooks with students (Ed. Elizabeth Mays) and My open textbook: Pedagogy & practice (Robin DeRosa).