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

JUNE 18, 2020

It didn’t align with the structure of her course. But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. Every course should be better every time it’s taught,” he says. They can with OER materials. That allows me to make mid-course corrections—or mid-week corrections.”

Course 207

Course OER Resources Education 207

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 182

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.

OER 183

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.

OER 169

OER STEM Course Libraries 169

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.

OER 170

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. .

OER 162

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.”

OER 167

OER Libraries lynda.com E-rate 167

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Student: I’ll study whether students learn better with OER than with traditional course materials! We’d talk about why these studies almost always result in “no significant difference.” (And if you’re thinking, “just increasing access to course materials will make a significant difference in student learning!”,

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OER Comparison Study Course 143

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.

OER 164

OER Advocacy Outcomes Instructional Materials 164

Doug Levin

JUNE 17, 2015

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.

Instructional Materials 387

Instructional Materials OER Student Data Privacy Broadband 387

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 135

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

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

The Journal

AUGUST 22, 2016

Gooru.org is an OER marketplace with 5,000,000+ open education resources. But, most excitingly, they are posting "just" 35 full courses that teachers can "copy and customize." We applaud gooru.org for taking this major step in providing support for teachers who are trying to #GoOpen!

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OER Course Resources Education 150

Iterating Toward Openness

APRIL 11, 2022

I’ve been interested in sustainability models for OER for decades. And for just as long, I’ve believed that there are useful lessons for us to learn on this topic from open source software – OER’s far more popular and influential sibling. What does “bug” mean in the context of OER?

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OER Analysis Software Outcomes 147

Edsurge

JANUARY 15, 2019

But fans of OER are increasingly facing a problem. While OER started off as free online textbooks, it still costs money to produce these materials, and professors often need guidance finding which ones are high quality. So OER advocates are realizing they need to change their pitch.

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OER Course Resources Libraries 148

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.

OER 153

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 136

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

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.”

OER 139

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. Simon , 1986). Beginning the cycle again.

OER 122

OER Outcomes Analysis Assessment 122

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 188

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 128

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 128

Edsurge

MARCH 3, 2020

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. “It It is moving up the adoption ladder,” says Susan Grajek, vice president of communities and research for Educause, of OER. “It In the U.S.,

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OER Resources Education Report 208

Iterating Toward Openness

AUGUST 27, 2019

As the movement grew and more people began advocating for the adoption of OER in place of traditionally copyrighted materials in classes, some advocates chose to make cost the primary focus of their advocacy. Materials that were openly licensed and free were the OER we had spent the last decade advocating for. grey below).

OER 112

OER Advocacy Policies Libraries 112

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.

OER 137

OER Policies Accessibility Outcomes 137

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.

OER 115

OER Libraries Course Study 115

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.

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OER Data Analysis Secondary 114

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.

OER 112

OER Data Outcomes Study 112

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 18, 2019

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.

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OER Advocacy Software Company 110

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.

OER 159

OER Resources Education Course 159

Iterating Toward Openness

AUGUST 13, 2019

Or correspondence courses (snail mail)? There are, of course, exceptional cases where people are doing genuinely novel and amazing things with the internet in support of student learning. This was, of course, not the only mode of instruction. But – particularly when it comes to OER – we aren’t.

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OER System Exercises Course 129

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.” So when people tell the story of how the term “OER-enabled pedagogy” came to be they should absolutely include Maha in it.

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OER Technology Exercises Online Learning 113

Edsurge

JULY 25, 2019

Use of free course materials among college students is up, with 22 percent downloading at least one such resource during the spring 2019 semester, according to research published Wednesday by the National Association of College Stores. The percent of students who reported downloading free materials has increased each semester since.

Course 164

Course OER Pearson Survey 164

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. This may be the one of the important opportunities for OER, blended learning, and CCSS we’ve seen to date. [Disclosure: I am part of an advisory group for this project.].

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OER Instructional Materials Blended Learning Groups 100