Iterating Toward Openness

JANUARY 19, 2023

The faculty survey asked the following question in 2018 and again in 2021: Which, if any, of the following open educational resources have you created and/or used in your courses? The authors then explain these results as follows: There has been a notable increase in the amount of faculty creating and using OER since 2018 (see Figure 39).

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OER Survey Course Resources 183

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

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 143

Iterating Toward Openness

JUNE 23, 2020

This fall I’m once again teaching IPT 531: Introduction to Open Education at BYU (check it out – it’s designed so anyone can participate) and today I’m beginning a pilot run-through of the course redesign with a small number of students. In the past I’ve written frequently about how we evaluate the impact of OER use.

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OER Education Course Learning Analytics 183

Edsurge

NOVEMBER 15, 2021

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.

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OER STEM Course Libraries 166

Doug Levin

FEBRUARY 21, 2016

K-12 education system by open educational resources (OER) since 2009, although my first exposure to the ideas and leaders of the movement stretch back to the launch of the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. This is where context matters most for the OER movement. Even within the U.S.

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OER Instructional Materials Meeting Advocacy 170

Hapara

AUGUST 17, 2022

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. .

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OER Differentiated Instruction Hapara Resources 162

Edsurge

JANUARY 4, 2018

But who makes the pitch for free or low-cost alternatives to textbooks known as OER, or open educational resources? One project she led this year involved creating a series of videos promoting “Textbook Heroes,”professors who have replaced commercial textbooks in their courses with OER. And it kind of hinders everything.”

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OER Libraries lynda.com E-rate 167

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 164

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Student: I’ll study whether students learn better with OER than with traditional course materials! Me: If I cross out these lines about the publisher’s copyright and write “Licensed CC BY” above it, have I made this book more effective at supporting student learning? Me: Let’s hear it! Me: Why not?

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OER Comparison Study Course 143

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. Resources in the public domain or released under an open license are OER.

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OER Advocacy Resources Accessibility 153

Edsurge

JANUARY 15, 2019

For the first time ever, the federal government put forward funds to support initiatives around open educational resources, and recent studies show that faculty attitudes towards using and adapting these openly-licensed learning materials are steadily improving. But fans of OER are increasingly facing a problem.

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OER Course Resources Libraries 156

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. Consider the following scenarios: A person downloads an OER to their laptop.

OER 125

OER LMS Laptops Accessibility 125

Iterating Toward Openness

APRIL 11, 2022

I’ve been interested in sustainability models for OER for decades. Longtime readers may recall that the research group I founded at Utah State University in 2003, the Open Sustainable Learning Opportunities group, became The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning in 2005, which I directed until I moved to BYU.)

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OER Analysis Software Outcomes 147

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. Ohio University is doing the same.

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OER Tools Industry LMS 153

Edsurge

OCTOBER 30, 2018

The number of colleges running efforts to help professors shift from published textbooks to low-cost online materials known as OER is growing rapidly. Nearly two thirds of colleges in the survey—64 percent—reported campus programs to “encourage faculty to use OER content for their courses.” which was released today.

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OER Survey Data Course 144

Edsurge

JUNE 22, 2017

And that’s been the driver behind nonprofit Achieving the Dream ’s (ATD) OER Degree Initiative , where 38 U.S. community colleges are creating full degree programs that utilize open educational resources (OER) from start to finish. We are hoping to use those courses as a foundation to build on other degrees.”

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OER Course Outcomes Report 139

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. Some have research, grant writing, and publication responsibilities in addition to teaching their courses. Some teach five or six courses per semester. Few have formal training in teaching or learning.

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OER Outcomes Analysis Assessment 122

Edsurge

JUNE 16, 2020

Lumen Learning, a company that sells low-cost OER textbooks and courseware, plans to start offering professional development services for faculty that can be bundled with its titles. In other words, some of its textbooks are now sold with coaching on how to teach with OER more effectively.

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OER Company Learning Course 126

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

Edsurge

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

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.

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OER Resources Course Education 187

Edsurge

MARCH 3, 2020

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.,

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OER Resources Education Report 215

Edsurge

OCTOBER 30, 2018

It’s not uncommon to stumble upon headlines about students spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on course materials. In response, open educational materials, or OER, have emerged as an alternative to expensive textbooks that disproportionately affect low-income students. McGuire’s team is researching some of them.

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OER Policies Accessibility Outcomes 145

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. One review offers evidence that students using OER as their primary course material sometimes perform better.) Jared Robinson and David A.

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OER Data Outcomes Study 116

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 116

Iterating Toward Openness

AUGUST 27, 2019

UNESCO later decided to refer to open content intended to support research, teaching, and learning as “open educational resources.” Materials that were openly licensed and free were the OER we had spent the last decade advocating for. Other schools have OER policies and OER degree programs. grey below).

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OER Advocacy Policies Libraries 112

Iterating Toward Openness

DECEMBER 20, 2018

At the OpenEd Conference in 2013, Nicole Allen and I challenged the OER community to save students one billion dollars. As a brief summary, part of the data collection involved sampling the prices for required course materials across a range of material formats, including new print, used print, print rental, digital rental, and loose-leaf.

OER 114

OER Data Analysis Secondary 114

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 110

Edsurge

JANUARY 12, 2018

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.

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OER Resources Education Digital Learning 103

Digital Promise

OCTOBER 18, 2018

Over the course of two and a half days, education leaders discussed the challenges facing their most marginalized students, moved work forward in five Challenge Collaboratives, visited schools within the co-host districts, and formed meaningful partnerships and relationships with leaders across the country.

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OER Case Study Meeting Assessment 311

Iterating Toward Openness

AUGUST 13, 2019

There’s much to learn from history. How could the things we learned about educational radio possibly inform our work with education television? Or correspondence courses (snail mail)? I’ll share a little of what I’ve learned below and draw one tentative conclusion, before moving on to a discussion. Or teaching machines?

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OER System Exercises Course 129

Edsurge

AUGUST 4, 2022

In May, the homework-help site that relies on student-generated content, Course Hero, dipped its toes into freely available, openly licensed alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, course materials. Course Hero officials say that the negative reaction came as a surprise.

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OER Resources Education Course 158

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. Today, Anagnoson’s online course is embedded into a Water Systems Technology zero-cost textbook degree program, or Z-degree. Now it’s my job.”

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OER Industry Course Guidelines 116

Iterating Toward Openness

JANUARY 24, 2019

Among other things, the post discusses her role in my decision to abandon the phrase “open pedagogy” and adopt the phrase “OER-enabled pedagogy.” ” It looks like it was also around this time that I first learned that the phrase “open pedagogy” had been used before by others (more on this below).

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OER Technology Exercises Online Learning 113

K12 Open Ed

APRIL 27, 2015

Last week, the K-12 OER Collaborative entered the next phase of their project, awarding contracts for rapid prototypes to the following developers: edCount LLC. Expeditionary Learning. Learn Zillion. In what creative ways can the savings in instructional materials funding be applied to improve teaching and learning?

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OER Instructional Materials Blended Learning Groups 100

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. But skeptics hold that the quality of digital course materials don’t stand up to that of the Pearson’s and McGraw Hill’s of the world. On its own, the OER company partners with nearly 150 campuses.

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OER LMS Company Course 108

Edsurge

FEBRUARY 27, 2020

In early 2017, organizations that have focused on digital learning came together to better leverage their strengths and capacities for a common goal: improving student success. The first goal was to create an environmental scan of the digital learning environment in higher education with a focus on adaptive technology.

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Trends Digital Learning Learning Secondary 217