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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. So, if these are the actions of someone who is an OER fan, what stops me short of claiming fanboy status? I work in K-12 education in the U.S., I beg to disagree. Image credits.
K-12 schools and districts turn to open educational resources (OER) for their flexibility. They are a cost-effective choice and make differentiating instruction and personalizing learning easier. When you search for OER, you can find already-created lesson plans or other resources to add to your own class plans.
Or, in which Generative AI meets OER meets Reusable Learning Objects. I was just surfing the web with Lynx , hitting the / key to read the source code of other people’s sites, and learning how to build my own. Actually, there weren’t even images in those first webpages. How would that even work?
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."
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!”
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.
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). Or faculty were taking the time to carefully vet the licensing of the resources they found and specifically chose OER to include in their courses?
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.
However, this model of instruction does not align with our emerging understanding of how students learn science best. In 2012, the National Research Council released A Framework for K-12 Science Education , a consensus report that outlined how research in the learning sciences should inform the development of a new set of science standards.
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. .
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.
I wanted to include a reading summarizing my current thinking on ‘evaluating the impact of OER’ in the course, so I’m letting some thoughts spill out below. In the past I’ve written frequently about how we evaluate the impact of OER use. and more OER impact research should follow that lead. versus 2.6).
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.
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.
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! Student: (ponders briefly) I guess not?
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. Increasingly, the answer is the campus library.
Award Winning Science Teacher Amy Pace Shares How She Uses OER Textbooks Amy Pace is a Presidential Award winning science teacher. She is using “free” OER textbooks for all her courses. OER stands for Open Education Resources which are often curated by experts via grants and other means. OER Resource Roundup by Edutopia.
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.
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.
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.)
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.”
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.
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.
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.
I learned a valuable lesson that day: words matter. ” Instead of “giving students access to resources,” we “go 1:1 with a blended learning approach.” When the car mechanic wanted to learn a new system, she didn’t say she was “exploring OERs through a blended, flipped approach.”
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. Why teachers are so excited about OER resources. YouTube and copyright /li> OER Commons.
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. There will be at least 53 degree pathways offered by the 38 schools.
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. In fact, that day may not be far off. It was downhill from there, I guess.
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.
Recently I’ve been doing both more thinking and more roll-up-your-sleeves working on continuous improvement of OER. Few have formal training in teaching or learning. Below I’m cross-posting two short pieces on this topic I recently published on Lumen’s site ( here and here ). We need each other.
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. I’ve written about this in general terms before, but with more time to ponder I now have a much clearer – and simpler – understanding of the problem.
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.
In response, open educational materials, or OER, have emerged as an alternative to expensive textbooks that disproportionately affect low-income students. But despite the excitement, there are obstacles to using OER. McGuire: The kinds of things that are being discussed [around using OER] are hard for many of institutions to access.
Professor Anna Mills discusses the evolving landscape of AI literacy in education, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach to integrating AI into writing and learning processes. Her OER textbook, How Arguments Work: A Guide to Writing and Analyzing Texts in College, has been used at over 65 colleges.
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.
In fact, some of the most powerful learning in my middle school science classroom has happened when I’ve pretended to NOT know the “right answer.” That’s why I’ve turned to open educational resources (OER). I’ve been using an OER science curriculum called OpenSciEd for five years, and it has completely revolutionized the way I teach.
One of the defining features of open educational resources is permission to engage in revise and remix activities with regard to OER. While those permissions make it possible for us to change and improve OER, they do nothing to tell us which OER to spend our time and energy improving – or how to improve them.
In this series we explore Powerful Learning, a set of principles to guide educators designing learning experiences that engage the hearts and minds of learners, and incorporate technology in ways that contribute to closing the Digital Learning Gap. Powerful learning must be collaborative and connected.
This morning, I attended the Blended Learning Panel moderated by Vicki Davis with panelists- Thomas Arnett , Jonathan Bergmann , Mike Gwaltney , Aaron Sams , and Stephanie Sandifer. I found the panel extremely informational for anyone integrating technology and also flipped learning. The free version records up to 10 minutes.
But OER advocates think open access course materials hold another kind of promise for students, too. They can with OER materials. That means OER courseware is the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of learning engineering, Wiley argues. 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.,
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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