OER FOR EMPOWERING TEACHERS

OER BASICS

NITTTR, CHENNAI

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OER for Empowering Teachers Instructional Material by P. Malliga is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License. Based on a work at iastate.pressbooks.pub/oerstarterkit.

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 1. OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

Learning outcomes:
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Define open educational resources.

• Explain the difference between OER and other free educational materials.
• Describe the challenges and benefits of using OER in a class.
In this chapter, we will introduce you to the concept of OER and the benefits and
challenges of using them.

1.1 BACKGROUND

The open education movement was originally inspired by the open source
community, with a focus on broadening access to information through the use of
free, open content. As Bliss & Smith (2017) explain in their breakdown of the
history of open education:

“much of our attention focused on OER’s usefulness at providing knowledge in its

original form to those
who otherwise might not have access. The implicit goal was to equalize access to
disadvantaged and
Advantaged peoples of the world – in MIT’s language, to create ‘a shared
intellectual Common.’

Following the rise of open education in the early 2000s, growing interest in
MOOCs, open courseware, and particularly open textbooks catapulted the
movement to new heights; however, there are still many instructors who have
never heard of open educational resources (OER) today.

1.2 WHAT IS AN OER?

The term OER (Open Educational Resources) was first defined by UNESCO in 2002
as “any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced
with an open license” and can “range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture
notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.”

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Open educational resources (OER) are openly-licensed, freely available
educational materials that can be modified and redistributed by users. They can
include any type of educational resource, from syllabi to full courses.

• Openly-licensed:
• Freely Available: The resources must be freely available online with no fee
to access. Physical OER may be sold at a low cost to facilitate printing.
• Modifiable: The resource must be made available under an open license
that allows for editing. Ideally, it should also be available in an editable
format.
Open educational resources (OER) are free and openly licensed educational
materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.
Open Education "...is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is
a public good and that technology in general and the Web in particular provide an
extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge."
- The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

The most comprehensive definition of OER available today is provided by the

Hewlett Foundation:

“Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any
medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released
under an open license that permits no cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution
by others with no or limited restrictions.”

With a definition so broad that it includes any educational material so long as it is

free to access and open, it might be easier to ask, “What isn’t an OER?”

1.3 WHAT IS NOT AN OER?

If a resource is not free or openly licensed, it cannot be described as an OER. For

example, most materials accessed through your library’s subscriptions cannot be
altered, remixed, or redistributed.

These materials require special permission to use and therefore cannot be

considered “open.”

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Table 1 below explains the difference between OER and other resources often
misattributed as OER.

Openly
Material Type Freely Available Modifiable
Licensed

Open educational resources Yes Yes Yes

Free online resources under

all rights reserved No Yes No
copyright

Materials available through

the University No Yes No
Library
Open access articles and
Yes Yes May be
monographs

Note: Although some materials are free to access for a library’s users, that does
not mean that they are free to access for everyone (including the library).
Similarly, while some open access resources are made available under a copyright
license that enables modification, this is not always the case.

1.4 BENEFITS OF USING OER

1.4.1 BENEFITS FOR STUDENTS

One of the first aspects of OER to be praised by the general public was the cost
savings that they could bring to students. The price of college textbooks has risen
greatly over the past 35 years, outpacing all other consumer goods in the
Consumer Price Index by a great margin as shown in Figure 1.

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The cost of textbooks has a profound impact on college students, many of whom
must wait to purchase their course materials until well into the semester or
choose not to purchase them at all. However, the unexpected additional cost of
textbooks can make the difference between a student persisting in college or
dropping out.

Access to a Quality Education

When you choose to share course materials openly, you are providing students
with the opportunity to engage with your content before, during, and after your
course. Because OER are always free to access online, students who are
interested in taking a course you teach can read up on the course ahead of time
and ensure that they are ready and interested in the material. Moreover,
students who have already taken your course can be safe in the knowledge that
their course materials will not evaporate at the end of the semester and that they
can continue to review the materials you provided to them for years to come.

The students who benefit from access to OER are not just the ones in your
classroom. Unlike affordability initiatives like course reserves, OER are free for
anyone in the world to access, whether they have a college affiliation or not.

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1.4.2. BENEFITS FOR INSTRUCTORS

Although cost savings are a major talking point in favor of adopting open
educational resources, instructors can utilize OER effectively without replacing
paid resources at all. In fact, the freedom to adapt OER to instructional needs is
often the most attractive aspect of OER. Since OER are openly licensed, educators
are free to edit, reorder, and remix OER materials in many ways.

Use, Improve, and Share

• Adapt and revise resources that have already been created to fit your
course syllabus.
• Create an updated second edition of an existing OER.
• Tailor resources to fit your specific course context (e.g., translation, local
examples).

Network and Collaborate with Peers

• Access educational resources that have been peer-reviewed by experts in

your field.
• Create a new open educational resource with a team of your peers.
• Explore user reviews for a more in-depth understanding of the resources
available.

Lower Costs to Improve Access to Information

• Enable all students to have equal access to your course materials.

• Provide students with the opportunity to explore course content before
enrolling.

Instructors can implement the most innovating and interactive teaching methods
like flipped learning and blended learning.

1.5 CHALLENGES OF USING OER

There are many benefits to using OER in the classroom; however, there are also
some drawbacks. The biggest challenge that instructors face when adopting OER
is best encapsulated by the phrase “availability may vary.”

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SUBJECT AVAILABILITY

Many of the largest OER projects funded over the past fifteen years targeted high
cost, high impact courses to save students money. Because of this, most of the
OER available today are for general education courses such as Psychology,
Biology, and Calculus. This does not mean that there are no OER available for
specialized subject areas or graduate level courses; however, there are more
resources to choose from for instructors who teach Introduction to Psychology
than for those who teach Electronic Systems Integration for Agricultural
Machinery & Production Systems.

FORMAT & MATERIAL TYPE AVAILABILITY

As with subject availability, the format and types of OER that have been
developed over time have largely been targeted at high enrollment courses which
could see substantial cost savings for students. There are many open textbooks
available today, but fewer options for ancillary materials. You can find lecture
slides, notes, and lesson plans online, but ancillary content such as homework
software and test banks are harder to find.

TIME & SUPPORT AVAILABILITY

Although the other challenges to OER use are inherent to the resources
themselves, this final drawback is a concern for you as a user and creator. It takes
time and effort to find OER that might work for your course, and if you want to
create and publish new resources, that takes exponentially more time. Time
constraints are always going to be an issue for instructors who want to try
something new in their course. Luckily, there are resources available to help you
locate, adopt, and implement OER.

1.6 SUMMARY

This chapter has provided a brief overview of what OER are, why they are used,
and the movement surrounding them. In the next chapter, we will review some
items you should keep in mind when adopting or creating an OER for the first
time.

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 2. COPYRIGHT AND OPEN LICENSING
Learning Objectives

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Define copyright and open licenses.

• Explain the purpose of copyright law.

An open license is a vital component of an open educational resource. Because of

this, it is important that you understand how open licenses work within copyright
law. This chapter will provide an overview of copyright law, fair use, and licensing
to help you navigate this topic.

2.1 COPYRIGHT LAW

U.S. copyright law protects an author’s rights over their original creative works
(e.g., research articles, books and manuscripts, artwork, video and audio
recordings, musical compositions, architectural designs, video games, and
unpublished creative works).1 As soon as something is “fixed in a tangible
medium of expression,” it is automatically protected by copyright.

According to Wex Legal Dictionary, a resource is fixed when:

“its embodiment …by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently

permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise
communicated for a period of more than transitory duration.”

In other words, an idea for a book you want to write is not protected by
copyright, but the first draft of your manuscript is. Copyright protection ensures
that the creator of a work has complete control over how their work is
reproduced, distributed, performed, displayed, and adapted. You do not need to
register your resource with the U.S. Copyright Office for this to come into effect; it
is automatic.

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2.2 PUBLIC DOMAIN

Works that are no longer protected by copyright are considered part of the public
domain. Items in the public domain can be reused freely for any purpose by
anyone, without giving attribution to the author or creator.

Public domain works in the U.S. include works whose creator died 70 years prior,
works published before 1924, or works dedicated to the public domain by their
rights holder. The Creative Commons organization created a legal tool called CC 0
to help creators dedicate their work to the public domain by releasing all rights to
it.

2.3 LICENSING

The copyright status of a work determines what you can and cannot do with it.6
As you begin to explore OER for use in your classroom, it is important that you
understand your rights over the works you create and what it means to give those
rights away.

Most copyrighted works are under full, “all rights reserved” copyright. This means
that they cannot be reused in any way without permission from the work’s rights
holder (usually the creator). One way you can get permission to use someone
else’s work is through a license, a statement or contract that allows you to
perform, display, reproduce, or adapt a copyrighted work in the circumstances
specified within the license. For example, the copyright holder for a popular book
might sign a license to provide a movie studio with one-time rights to use their
characters in a film. ?

If an OER is available under a copyright license that restricts certain (re)uses, you
can make a fair use assessment for reproducing or adapting that work. However,
having explicit permission is preferable. We do not recommend using fully
copyrighted works in OER projects without written permission from the work’s
rights holder.

2.4 OPEN LICENSES

All OER are made available under some type of open license, a set of authorized
permissions from the rights holder of a work for any and all users. The most
popular of these licenses are Creative Commons (CC) licenses, customizable
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copyright licenses that allow others to reuse, adapt, and republish content with
few or no restrictions. CC licenses allow creators to explain in plain language how
their works can be used by others.
Creative Commons licenses will be explored in more detail in the next chapter.
However, there are other open licenses that can be applied to educational
materials. A few of these licenses are described below:

GNU Free Documentation License:

a copyleft license that grants the right to copy, redistribute, and modify a
resource. It requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same
license. Copies may be sold commercially, but the original document or source
code must be made available to the user as well.

Free Art License:

The FAL “grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform creative works
without infringing the author’s rights.” It is meant to be applied to artistic works,
not documents. If you’re interested in learning more about open licenses, feel
free to explore the Free Software Foundation’s information on copy left licenses,
some of the first licenses used for open content.

2.5 WHY OPEN LICENSES?

Open licenses are an integral part of what makes an educational resource an OER.
The adaptability and reusability of OER make it so that they are not just free to
access, but also free for instructors who want to alter the materials for use in
their course. For example, in the figure below an openly licensed image has been
traced to make it more readable for users.

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One of the tenets of OER laid out early on in the open education movement was
the idea of the 5 Rs (originally the 4 Rs) introduced by David Wiley (2014). These
five attributes lay out what it means for something to be truly “open,” as the term
is used in open education.

The 5 Rs of openness include:

• 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)

While the “redistribute” and “revise” rights are the most commonly exercised
rights in open education, each of the five plays an important role in the utility of
an open educational resource.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at Creative Commons licenses and how they
facilitate the expression of the 5 Rs in unique ways.
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REFERENCES:

1. Elder, A.K. (2019). The OER Starter Kit. Ames, IA: Iowa State University
Digital Press. Retrieved from iastate.pressbooks.pub/oerstarterkit
The OER Starter Kit by Abbey Elder is available under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.

2. Bliss, T J and Smith, M. 2017. A Brief History of Open Educational

Resources. In: Jhangiani, R S and Biswas-Diener, R. (Eds.) Open: The
Philosophy and Practices
that are Revolutionizing Education and Science (pp. 9–27). London: Ubiquity
Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bbc.b.

3. William & Flore Hewlett Foundation. (n.d.). OER defined. Retrieved from
https://hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational-resources/

4. Free Sotware Foundation. (2008). GNU Free Documentation License.

Retrieved from https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html

5. Copyleft Attitude. (2007). Free Art License 1.3. Retrieved from

http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/

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