LEARNING OUTCOMES
- Define the word open in the context of open educational resources
- Differentiate between OER, open textbooks, open courses, and MOOCs (massive open online courses)
PERSONAL REFLECTION: WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU
What impacts have the rising costs and decreased flexibility of educational materials had on you and those you know? What role do you think that “all rights reserved” copyrights and related laws have played in driving up costs and driving down flexibility for learners and teachers?
Acquiring Essential Knowledge
Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium 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.[1] Or we could use this less technical definition to describe OER: OER are educational materials that can be freely downloaded, edited, and shared to better serve all students.[2]
OER and Open Textbooks
To begin, you should watch the video Why OER? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc2ovlU9Ndk | CC BY 3.0
In contrast to traditional educational materials, which are constantly becoming more expensive and less flexible, OER give everyone, everywhere, free permission to download, edit, and share them with others. David Wiley provides another popular definition, stating that only educational materials licensed in a manner that provides the public with permission to engage in the 5R activities can be considered OER.
The 5R permissions are:
- Retain—permission to make, own, and control copies of the content (e. g., download, duplicate, store, and manage it)
- Reuse—permission 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—permission to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e. g., translate the content into another language)
NOTES - ↑ This is a Creative Commons adaptation of the UNESCO OER definition: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/open-educational-resources.
- ↑ Drafted by OER Comms, which is a coalition of North American open education advocates working on OER communication: oer-comms
googlegroups.com.
