Iterating Toward Openness

JANUARY 27, 2025

Or, in which Generative AI meets OER meets Reusable Learning Objects. I’ve been working on fleshing out the architecture for Open Educational Language Models and have reached a point where it’s time to share a progress update. This means the content can be much more to the point than typical OER.

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OER Meeting Course Examples 103

Doug Levin

MARCH 5, 2018

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.

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OER Assessment Industry Libraries 186

The Journal

JUNE 20, 2016

OER – open education resources are a boon to K-12. But OER is a start, not an end. As K-12 moves to fully 1-to-1 and blended learning, K-12 needs to go beyond digitized versions of paper-based lessons (and proprietary formats) and develop an open standard for the "deeply digital lesson."

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OER Blended Learning Resources Learning 225

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

Iterating Toward Openness

JANUARY 19, 2023

I was particularly interested in the survey’s findings about the state of open educational resources in US higher education. 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?

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OER Survey Course Resources 183

Iterating Toward Openness

AUGUST 31, 2022

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!”

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OER Outcomes Comparison Study 197

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 187

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

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

Edsurge

JULY 11, 2022

Clicking onto their favorite courses at the end of May, educators found that they were getting redirected somewhere else. To their surprise, however, the educators found themselves not on Lumen’s website but on Course Hero, a homework-help site that’s blocked by some higher ed institutions for its use by some students as a cheating tool.

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OER Course Chegg Company 187

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. He and his students happily use open educational resources for textbooks.

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OER STEM Course Libraries 171

Hapara

AUGUST 17, 2022

Has your school district started to use open educational resources (OER) yet? Maybe educators in your district have collaborated on finding and curating openly-licensed nonfiction or fiction, videos, images, simulations or audio clips to add to lessons. But has your school district considered K-12 OER textbooks?

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OER Differentiated Instruction Hapara Resources 162

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 149

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. ” OER / ZTC advocates have largely succeeded in turning a blind eye to the courseware elephant in the room. We can hope. I believe there will be.

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OER Advocacy Outcomes Instructional Materials 164

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

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

The Journal

MARCH 6, 2019

OER – Open Education Resources — will play an increasingly important role as schools move to 1-to-1. In this week’s blog post, we describe OER 1.0, and OER 3.0. Examples of OER 3.0, deeply digital curricula, created by Michigan K-12 teachers, using the Collabrify Roadmap Platform, will be highlighted.

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OER Examples Resources Education 150

Edsurge

JANUARY 4, 2018

But who makes the pitch for free or low-cost alternatives to textbooks known as OER, or open educational resources? Take the University of Texas at Arlington, which has a full-time Open Education Librarian, Michelle Reed. The online library contains links to OER titles as well as reviews written by professors.

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OER Libraries lynda.com E-rate 167

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. It’s been true for decades.

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OER LMS Laptops Accessibility 125

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

JANUARY 15, 2019

Open educational resources hit a turning point in 2018. 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.

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OER Course Resources Libraries 161

Digital Promise

JUNE 8, 2017

That is until about five minutes into the session, when a hand in the audience went up asking, “Can you define what you mean by OERs?”. Define OERs. So I explained to my class that Open Educational Resources (OER) could be most easily defined as “free stuff on the Web.” Librarians are trained master curators.

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OER Resources Classroom Education 227

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. This is no longer an intellectual argument on the part of the [OER] evangelists.” As Green put it: “There’s a huge set of concerns about quality of OER by faculty.”

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OER Survey Data Course 150

Edsurge

JUNE 18, 2020

Much of the attention that open educational resources have earned focuses on their low cost. But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. They can with OER materials.

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Course OER Resources Education 217

Edsurge

MARCH 3, 2020

Open educational resources have gone global and may help make learning more accessible, equitable and inclusive around the world. So says the new Educause Horizon report , which identifies technologies and trends that are changing higher education. These are the kinds of efforts the report describes as helping OER spread in the U.S.

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OER Resources Education Report 217

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

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

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 157

The CoolCatTeacher

SEPTEMBER 22, 2015

Open education resources (OERs) can help busy teachers everywhere! Today’s guest, Sue Jones, has created a helpful guide to OERs and is using them in her highered classroom. How OER resources can save teachers lots of time. A cool network where educators share tons of free resources. Educator Resources.

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OER Resources Tools How To 150

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

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 113

The Journal

APRIL 5, 2016

OER – Open Education Resources – are being touted by the Department of Education as the key to future of K-12 curriculum. While there is no question that OER are a component of the new digital curriculum, in this blog, we answer the question raised in the blog post’s title.

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OER Resources Education 276

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

This week on the blog I’m serializing a talk I gave for CSU Channel Islands last week as part of their Open Education Week festivities. 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. Eating a piece of cake.

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OER Libraries Accessibility Exercises 139

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.

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OER Course Outcomes Report 145

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 194

Edsurge

JULY 8, 2020

What do educators think about the quality of the curriculum they teach? It considered all adoption types, from traditional publishers, to local curriculum creation, to open educational resources (OER). Only one factor came up again and again when educators responded favorably to the quality of the curriculum they use.

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Survey OER Training Pearson 185