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and I am merely a fan – not a fanboy – of open educational resources (OER).** Others surely see me as some sort of OER fanatic. K-12 context, including issues of accessibility , the copyright that should get assigned to teacher-created materials , and interoperability gaps and needs. I beg to disagree. Image credits.
K-12 schools and districts turn to open educational resources (OER) for their flexibility. When you search for OER, you can find already-created lesson plans or other resources to add to your own class plans. Let’s look at the benefits of using an OER lesson plan and what it looks like. Why use an OER lesson plan?
I recently had the honor of traveling to the MIT campus in Boston and participating in a panel discussion on Open Education Resources (OER) at The Sixth Conference of MIT''s Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC) with three illustrious advocates of these open resources: Nicole Allen, Philipp Schmidt, and panel moderator Steve Carson.
And, because you’ve got to play the hits, let’s look at what their impact will be on OER as well. Current funding for the creation of OER (when it’s available at all) typically focuses on the courses enrolling the largest number of students.
In a post of nearly two years ago (“ OERwashing: Beyond the Elephant Test “), I argued that the OER community lacked a reliable way to assess new entrants to the OER field, especially for-profit organizations, in terms of their support for openness and OER community values. Petrides, L., and Watson, C.E.
This article started out with my being bothered by the fact that ‘OER adoption reliably saves students money but does not reliably improve their outcomes.’ ’ For many years OER advocates have told faculty, “When you adopt OER your students save money and get the same or better outcomes!”
These days low-cost alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, are getting a boost as a potential solution. Last week, for example, Lumen Learning, a company that sells low-cost OER textbooks and courseware, announced it received a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
This is what large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are doing to OER. Next generation OER will not be open textbooks that were created faster or more efficiently because LLMs wrote first drafts in minutes. That’s current generation OER simply made more efficiently.
For some folks in higher ed, the very idea of using open educational resources (OER) sparks dread. The right OER provides professors opportunities to teach the latest research and even make areas like math and science more inclusive. EdSurge: Why are you such a proponent of OER in higher ed? Here’s how I look at it.
Has your school district started to use open educational resources (OER) yet? But has your school district considered K-12 OER textbooks? Printed textbooks have been used for centuries, and while they still work, there are many reasons why school districts are transitioning to OER versions. .
Given the rise of OER (of which I am a fan ), an increasing array of business models, questions about the degree of alignment to state standards and assessments, claims of effectiveness, and interoperability concerns, the instructional materials procurement decisions facing school districts have never been more complicated. Image credits.
They were trying to prep summer courses by linking to the freely available, openly licensed alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, content offered by Lumen Learning, a courseware provider that argues that OER can be a tool in making higher education more equitable. Hi OER Friends! There was confusion. “Hi
There’s great news out of the recent UNESCO meeting in Paris, where member states unanimously adopted the draft Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). This dramatically simplifies understanding what is and isn’t OER. This dramatically simplifies understanding what is and isn’t OER. emphasis added).
tl ;dr – If a resource is licensed in a way that grants you permission to engage in the 5R activities, and grants you those permissions for free, it’s an open educational resource (OER) – no matter where you find it or how it’s being used. I have an obsession with definitions. It’s been true for decades.
Regardless of where you stand on the debate over open educational resources, you’re probably wondering: Does OER actually improve learning outcomes? At least, that was one of the main takeaways from a short session led by Phillip Grimaldi, director of research at OpenStax, a nonprofit OER initiative out of Rice University.
At some point over the last decade, open educational resources (OER) advocacy in US higher education became zero textbook costs (ZTC) advocacy. But OER / ZTC advocates have had a fundamental problem simmering for many years now, and the recent advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 will quickly bring that simmer to a boil.
Indeed, the often unspoken relationship between OER and educational technology can be fraught with misplaced assumptions, red flags, value conflicts, and licensing complications. That the U.S. You can read some of the highlights of this work in my interview (“ How can technology advance open educational resources?
Student: I’ll study whether students learn better with OER than with traditional course materials! And if you’re thinking, “just increasing access to course materials will make a significant difference in student learning!”, You’ve likely crossed over into the realm of OER-enabled pedagogy.).
I recently wrote a brief essay about the wonderful new UNESCO OER Recommendation. For those of you who don’t want to read the full analysis below, here’s the key takeaway: Imagine what would happen if making copies of OER was illegal. Under the definition of OER now adopted unanimously by UNESCO member states, it can be.
In this first bite-sized installment I’m going to address the major flaw in the OER definition provided as part of the recent UNESCO OER Recommendation. For a license to be “open,” it must grant the following permissions: “no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation, and redistribution by others.”
Yesterday IHE published an article about the “ inclusive access ” programs offered by most major textbook publishers. ” What problem does the inclusive access model purport to solve? . And obviously, both inclusive access and OER are about solving the cost problem. Can you see it?
At OpenEd18 I gave a presentation titled “Questioning the OER Orthodoxy: Is the Commons the Right Metaphor for our Work?” After this brief discussion, I asked “what if the commons is the wrong metaphor for our work with OER?” During the presentation, I shared the following contrasts between a commons and OER.
Open educational resources (OER) have long been touted as “the next big thing” in higher education, but the drawn-out hype has led many educators and administrators to wonder if it would ever live up to its expectations. Those days are over: 2017 was OER’s breakthrough year. That happened in 2017. Ohio University is doing the same.
In response, open educational materials, or OER, have emerged as an alternative to expensive textbooks that disproportionately affect low-income students. But as more open materials become accessible, advocates for open education still see room for improvement. Those are prohibitive, and really create a barrier for access for learners.
Recently I’ve been doing both more thinking and more roll-up-your-sleeves working on continuous improvement of OER. And this process of making OER more effective every semester – also known as “continuous improvement” – is where we see some of the most exciting opportunities to collaborate with faculty.
So Hardy and a colleague decided to create their own lab manual—and make it open access. But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. They can with OER materials. “It was not good at all,” Hardy says. “I Every course should be better every time it’s taught,” he says.
Open educational resources have gone global and may help make learning more accessible, equitable and inclusive around the world. OER was one of six “emerging technologies and practices” the panelists highlighted as most likely to significantly influence postsecondary teaching and learning in the future. In the U.S.,
As momentum for digital learning builds, some districts—80 percent according to the 2017 Consortium for School Networking’s (CoSN) K12 IT Leadership Survey Report —are using open educational resources (OER), which the U.S. But while many benefits of OER are visible on the surface, we must notice the fine print.
I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. There are some things about working with OER that are just harder or more painful than they need to be, and getting more people actively involved in using OER will require us to reduce or eliminate those points of friction.
Can open educational resources, or OER, truly create more equity and access? That was the question at the heart of our #DLNchat on January 9, which centered around OER in Higher Education. To me OER is also about the democratization of access to education, and the pursuit and sharing of knowledge.
Their work is stored online, so they can access it from anywhere.” I called it “No Excuses: Anytime, Anywhere Access to Student Work (For You & Them!)” ” Instead of “giving students access to resources,” we “go 1:1 with a blended learning approach.” ” “OH!
With course materials averaging around $1,200 per year , many colleges over the past decade have adopted open educational resources (OER) to cut costs for students. One review offers evidence that students using OER as their primary course material sometimes perform better.) This isn’t uncommon.
Communications librarian Kristen Hoffman oversees much of the OER work at Seattle Pacific University, a Christian university in Washington. Pricey textbooks and access codes are a national challenge. The campus as a whole is still not behind OER,” says Michael Whitchurch, digital learning services librarian BYU.
Students who took multiple community college courses that used only free or low-cost OER materials earned more credits over time than their peers who took classes that used traditional course materials such as textbooks, according to a new study. Free Isn’t Free For students, OER texts are typically free, or nearly free.
Open Educational Resources (OER) have yet to cozy up with the more orthodox academics and pushy print publishers of the world. Advocates praise their accessible low-prices and ability to meet students on digital devices. On its own, the OER company partners with nearly 150 campuses.
With just a few clicks, she shares the content with each student to quickly access it when they log in to their H?para One of Mrs. Perkins’s learners uses assistive technology , a screen reader, to read and can also access the digital materials. Accessing digital learning resources . At 11:00 a.m.,
There would be huge benefits to the OER ecosystem if we made similar arguments with commercial publishers, helping them understand why switching to an OER model would be good for their business. Why Commercial Publishers Should Switch to an OER Model. And a switch to OER would help publishers solve both of them.
The initiative intends to create degree pathways with courses that only use open educational resources, known as OER, so students don’t have to spend money on class materials. College of the Canyons’ history with OER starts before Anagnonson’s dabble, however. Using OER in those courses, she added, “really started out of necessity.”
We have a similar problem in the open educational resources (OER) space. Many people are in the habit of referring to OER as a commons. OER are not like the shared resources at the center of traditional commons. If either of these conditions come to pass, everyone loses access to the shared resources and we all lose the game.
What I do want to comment on (in greater than 140 characters) is the practice of ‘openwashing:’ what it is, why I believe not being able to go beyond a pro-OER elephant test for organizations and service providers is untenable in practice, and some thoughts on what we can do about it. The Pro-OER Elephant Test.
The commitment, in a nutshell, is to replace at least one textbook with open educational resources (OER) within one year, share in a community of practice with other school districts, and share the resources created with a Creative Commons license. The work begins with implementation and how schools plan to strategically scale OER.
It also helps schools reach goals like higher student success, better data analysis, more robust cybersecurity and easier access to education technology, the report’s authors explain. SIGN UP: Get more news from the EdTech newsletter in your inbox every two weeks! Transfer Student Data Seamlessly Across Academic Careers.
As schools and districts try to reduce textbook costs and digitize instructional resources, one of the struggles many teachers have is finding good repositories of open education resources (OER). The first step is to know how to accessOER resources. AccessingOER. How to find OER.
Last week I posted the middle section of the presentation, How Generative AI Affects Open Educational Resources , in which I described how we need to move beyond narrow thinking about how generative AI impacts our work with traditional OER and begin thinking more broadly about the power generative OER.
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