1.1 What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

Definition

As all great workshops, courses, books, and presentations go we must begin with a definition.

If you were to put in "OER definition" into your favorite search engine, several different websites with varying types of definitions will pop up. They all basically boil down to the same idea, however, the OER community tends to refer to the Hewlett Foundation's definition. It goes, OER are “teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others."¹

OER can include a variety of different resource types including full courses, individual course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. We might automatically think of a textbook, but the definition is much more broad than that.

A bit of an easier test to decide if something is an OER or not is to use what are called the 5R's.² In essence, to be OER the material has to have an open license to engage in the following 5 Rs and free at the point of access.

Image depicts five capital R's in different colors representing the 5 R's of OER.

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)
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)
Revise: the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Retain: the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
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)
- - - - The image used for the "5 Rs of OER" was retrieved from Making Open Educational Resources: A Guide for Students by Students and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial ShareAlike 4.0 International License

In fact, this course was modified upon content from various groups and schools who created their own OER Canvas courses and released them under open licenses. You can see a list of them on the Home page.

Benefits

OER can have many benefits. The first, and most obvious, one being the cost savings for students. Here at UT, 39% of students dropped a course because of textbook costs, and 69% say they did not purchase a textbook because of costs.³ It is important to consider costs when selecting instructional materials for the course and how it might affect students, especially those coming from underserved backgrounds or who are Pell-grant eligible.

Reported from a spring 2016 student survey at UT administered by UALC (n=572).

However, cost is not the only benefit to faculty and students. Due to the open licenses of OER, which will be explained more fully in Module 2, faculty have the ability to adapt, edit, and remix content to how they would like to teach, organize, and present curriculum. It provides the ultimate academic freedom, of sorts. Content can be updated immediately without having to wait for new editions of textbooks to be published.

Additionally, inclusion of OER in the curriculum has been shown to benefit students’ academic success. A 2018 study showed that OER in courses improved grades and decreased drops, withdrawal, and fails for all students, but especially Pell grant recipients, part-time students, and underserved populations.⁴

You can find quality OER comparable to traditionally published materials. For example, OpenStax has textbooks that are well-designed and peer reviewed for many general education subject areas. There are also rubrics and guides you can use to evaluate the quality of OER material (we will go over this in a later module). You are not expected to sacrifice quality for cost, but take the time to explore possibly OER in your subject area to see if a free-option is available.

Affordable Educational Resources (AER)

We've talked a lot about the specifics of OER. Now, that's a very specific category that not everything that is freely available on the web falls into. Just because something doesn't have an open license does not mean it is not of value. Here at UT, we look at openness on a spectrum. Sometimes, OER just doesn't exist for certain disciplines or content areas. It's a growing field, and we hope that faculty would consider creating resources to fill that gap. However, sometimes that is not practical. Within the conversation of utilizing OER, we also like to talk about content that might be free but still under copyright. This includes websites/resources that are free to access but don't have an open license (again, we will go over the specifics of what this means in the next module). Library resources also fall into this category. At the end of the day, we are looking at removing access barriers for students. If that is accomplished using OER, fantastic! If nothing is available and a variety of library resources plus some copyrighted web articles are used that is great as well. These types of resources are still embracing a more open culture of access on campus and in the classroom.

Video

Quick Check

The 5 R's of the Creative Commons are?

reuse, retain, revise, remix, and redistribute

reuse, retain, remain, remix, and reassign

reassign, reuse, retain, remix, and revise

reuse, remove, retain, redistribute, and remix

Check Answer

References

1 The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (2015). Open Educational Resources: Advancing widespread adoption to improve instruction and learning. Retrieved from https://hewlett.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/OER-strategy-memo.pdf

2 Wiley, D. (2014). The access compromise and the 5th R. Improving Learning. Retrieved from https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221

3 Utah Academic Library Consortium OER Survey, 2016

4 Colvard, N., Watson, C. E., & Park, H. (2018). The impact of open educational resources on various student success metrics. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 30(2): 262-275. Retrieved from http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/IJTLHE3386.pdf