Edsurge

APRIL 19, 2022

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.

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OER Course Company Report 180

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

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.

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OER Advocacy Resources Accessibility 153

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 7, 2018

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.

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OER LMS Laptops Accessibility 122

Doug Levin

APRIL 30, 2018

Indeed, the often unspoken relationship between OER and educational technology can be fraught with misplaced assumptions, red flags, value conflicts, and licensing complications. You can read some of the highlights of this work in my interview (“ How can technology advance open educational resources? That the U.S.

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OER Technology Education Software 150

Edsurge

OCTOBER 11, 2018

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.

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OER Learning Outcomes Comparison 134

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 21, 2023

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.

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OER Advocacy Outcomes Instructional Materials 159

Iterating Toward Openness

DECEMBER 2, 2019

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.

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OER Accessibility Examples Resources 146

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Student: I’ll study whether students learn better with OER than with traditional course materials! This conversation was a wonderful jumping off point to discuss the characteristics of an educational resource that actually function to support student learning. You’ve likely crossed over into the realm of OER-enabled pedagogy.).

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OER Comparison Study Course 143

Edsurge

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

There’s new evidence that open educational resources may contribute to helping students complete college. The findings come out of the Achieving the Dream OER Degree Initiative , which provided grant money to 38 community colleges across 13 states to create degree pathways of courses that use OER materials instead of commercial textbooks.

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OER Resources Course Education 186

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

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.

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OER Resources Accessibility Examples 130

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 9, 2020

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.”

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OER Libraries Accessibility Exercises 135

Edsurge

DECEMBER 28, 2017

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.

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OER Tools Industry LMS 152

Edsurge

MAY 23, 2017

David Wiley, a pioneer of open education resources who co-founded Lumen Learning , a for-profit company that supports OER efforts, sees one place where textbooks could actually be vanquished by openly licensed alternatives: community colleges. Why create a for-profit to push for things to be open and accessible?

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OER Company Software Accessibility 155

Hapara

JUNE 16, 2022

Open educational resources, also known as OER, provide a great way to supplement curriculum to differentiate instruction and better meet each learner’s needs in your classroom. This scenario is pretty common for educators, but remains an obstacle when equally distributing resources. So what does that mean?

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Differentiated Instruction OER Resources Hapara 147

Iterating Toward Openness

OCTOBER 9, 2018

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.

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OER Outcomes Analysis Assessment 122

Digital Promise

MAY 20, 2016

This gap between the need and available educational services has prompted calls for innovative ways to improve access to quality educational resources. Much to our surprise, over 1,500 people from around the world registered for the course — and, to date, are actively engaged in creating free, open resources for adult learners.

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Resources MOOC How To OER 212

Edsurge

OCTOBER 30, 2018

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.

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OER Policies Accessibility Outcomes 137

Hapara

MARCH 17, 2022

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. Distributing open educational resources. It’s now 10 a.m. At 11:00 a.m.,

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OER Chromebook Hapara Accessibility 235

Iterating Toward Openness

SEPTEMBER 4, 2024

Next week I hope to post the first section of the presentation, which outlines the reasons why people who care deeply about affordability, access, and improving outcomes should consider shifting their focus away from OER (as we have understood it for the last 25+ years) and toward generative AI.

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OER Resources Education Examples 133

Edsurge

NOVEMBER 19, 2017

Adoption of digital learning resources is taking hold in schools and districts across the United States. 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.

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OER CMS Guidelines Digital Learning 117

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 15, 2018

In the link in that quote, Stephen writes “The ‘conversion’ of an open educational resource is a modification of the resource, or conditions related to the resource, such that it is in some way transformed from being an open educational resource to something that is not an open educational resource.”

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OER Accessibility Resources Examples 86

Edsurge

OCTOBER 24, 2018

One popular draw to open educational resources is that these openly-licensed learning materials can—and are often encouraged to—be tailored for a particular professor or course. Communications librarian Kristen Hoffman oversees much of the OER work at Seattle Pacific University, a Christian university in Washington.

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OER Libraries Course Study 115

Digital Promise

NOVEMBER 6, 2014

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!

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Technology OER Flipped Classroom Learning 281

Iterating Toward Openness

JANUARY 31, 2020

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.

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OER LMS Software Course 123

Edsurge

AUGUST 24, 2020

As countless educators around the world have scrambled to figure out how to deliver lessons remotely with whisker-thin budgets, many turned to open education resources (OER). Her mission has been constant: Give students and teachers high-quality, free resources that can help each learn in their own way.

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OER EdTech Exercises Resources 212

Iterating Toward Openness

FEBRUARY 4, 2019

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. Rule 1: Openly licensed resources cannot be overused or overconsumed. A Different Commons Game.

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OER Resources Groups Accessibility 102

Edsurge

JUNE 9, 2017

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. Wiley—which looked at almost 5,000 undergraduates using OER at ten colleges and universities. This isn’t uncommon.

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OER Data Outcomes Study 110

eSchool News

JANUARY 22, 2018

If you are late to the #GoOpen party, it is the commitment to expand and accelerate the use of openly licensed educational resources in schools across the country. The work begins with implementation and how schools plan to strategically scale OER. Next page: How to get started.).

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OER Resources Accessibility How To 94

Edsurge

MARCH 28, 2018

But it wasn’t until her current gig, serving as an instructor for a course on water supply and demand in California, that she got her feet wet with open educational resources. 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.”

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OER Industry Course Guidelines 110

eSchool News

AUGUST 24, 2017

MENLO PARK, CA [August 24, 2017] — Open Up Resources, the nonprofit provider of openly licensed curriculum for K–12 schools, has released its first openly licensed core program, the Illustrative Mathematics 6–8 Math curriculum. ABOUT OPEN UP RESOURCES. schools, the curriculum is now available for free to school districts.

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OER Resources Kaplan Instructional Materials 85

Edsurge

APRIL 20, 2017

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.

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OER LMS Company Course 101

eSchool News

SEPTEMBER 6, 2018

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 access OER resources. Accessing OER. How to find OER.

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OER How To Assessment Instructional Materials 82

Doug Levin

MAY 16, 2016

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.

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OER Software Company Twitter 170

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 18, 2019

In 2002, UNESCO followed those leads choosing to name the subset of open content that was useful for teaching and learning “open educational resources,” instead of a name with “free” in the title.). Why Commercial Publishers Should Switch to an OER Model. And a switch to OER would help publishers solve both of them.

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OER Advocacy Software Company 106

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 4, 2024

However, inclusive access and equitable access aren’t the only models that automatically charge students a fee for their course materials. Many institutions charge students a fee associated with their OER courses as a way of funding the institutions’ OER efforts.

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OER Advocacy Policies Course 75

A Principal's Reflections

MAY 20, 2018

Emerging technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, open education resources (OER), coding, and adaptive learning tools are moving more into the mainstream in some schools. The World Wide Web has transformed how we access, consume, create, and share information. How are we adapting and evolving?

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OER Personal Learning Network Outcomes Blended Learning 290

Iterating Toward Openness

JULY 23, 2018

By definition, open educational resources (OER) are licensed in a manner that gives you permission to change, update, and improve them. Learning analytics, on the other hand, can provide great insight into where course materials – including OER – are not effectively supporting student learning.

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OER Learning Analytics Analysis Course 94