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

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

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 229

The CoolCatTeacher

SEPTEMBER 22, 2015

Want free resources? 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.

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OER Resources Tools How To 150

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

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 169

Hapara

AUGUST 17, 2022

Has your school district started to use open educational resources (OER) yet? If so, they’ve found out how many great resources are available online to use, share and modify. But has your school district considered K-12 OER textbooks? First, OER are free for anyone to use. They’ll save your school district money.

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OER Differentiated Instruction Hapara Resources 162

Edsurge

JULY 11, 2022

They were trying to prep summer courses by linking to the freely available, openly licensed alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, content offered by Lumen Learning, a courseware provider that argues that OER can be a tool in making higher education more equitable. Hi OER Friends! There was confusion.

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OER Course Chegg Company 185

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

Doug Levin

FEBRUARY 25, 2016

I’ve established that I am a fan of open educational resources (OER) and think that K-12 educators and policymakers would benefit from thinking more deeply about the ownership of instructional materials. To that end, I present the first draft of “ #GoOpen: OER for K-12 Educators – Frequently Asked Questions.”

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OER Education Instructional Materials EdTech 278

Edsurge

JUNE 18, 2020

They worked nights and weekends to develop the resource, which can be used digitally through a WordPress website or downloaded as a PDF. They added activities that take advantage of resources in their region, like a lab that has students hammer rock from a local quarry to look for trilobite fossils. They can with OER materials.

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Course OER Resources Education 207

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

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. “It In the U.S.,

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OER Resources Education Report 208

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

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

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 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 125

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

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

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

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

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 188

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

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 148

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

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

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 153

Teacher Tech

MAY 7, 2019

Have OER and Open Up Resources on Your Radar Guest Blog post by Shaelynn Farnsworth OER or Open Education Resources has been around for over 20 years. Previously, OER was more prominent in higher-ed, but awareness of OER continues to grow across the nation in PreK-12 settings.

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OER Edcamps Resources Education 111

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. Accessing an educational resource. The definition in the recommendation as set forth in Section I. Definition and Scope reads: 1. Eating a piece of cake. Driving a car.

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OER Libraries Accessibility Exercises 139

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 136

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

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. Creative Commons or GNU, that specify how the resource may be reused, adapted, and shared.

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OER Resources Education Digital Learning 99

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. This was the company’s “first foray” into OER, and it is still figuring out how the OER fits, Morris says. “I

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OER Resources Education Course 159

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 139

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 227

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