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 166

OER STEM Course Libraries 166

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 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 142

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 154

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. Ohio University is doing the same.

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OER Tools Industry LMS 153

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

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

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 233

Edsurge

NOVEMBER 19, 2017

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. But while many benefits of OER are visible on the surface, we must notice the fine print.

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OER CMS Guidelines Digital Learning 121

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

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 125

Iterating Toward Openness

AUGUST 13, 2019

registration systems, financial aid and payment systems, transcript requests and fulfillment, etc.). In contrast, the internet is largely defined by its capacity for interactivity (with other people, with dynamic systems, etc.). But – particularly when it comes to OER – we aren’t.

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OER System Exercises Course 129

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).

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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. The overall average price for “OER Only” (Open Educational Resources in all formats, including new print, used print, rental, loose-leaf, and digital) is $10.69. The adoption rate of OER is 6.3%. OER Hybrid.

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OER Data Analysis Secondary 114

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

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

MARCH 28, 2018

Today, Anagnoson’s online course is embedded into a Water Systems Technology zero-cost textbook degree program, or Z-degree. The initiative intends to create degree pathways with courses that only use open educational resources, known as OER, so students don’t have to spend money on class materials. But small kinks have cropped up.

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OER Industry Course Guidelines 114

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

Digital Promise

NOVEMBER 6, 2014

When the car mechanic wanted to learn a new system, she didn’t say she was “exploring OERs through a blended, flipped approach.” When the marketing head of a company started connecting with others through LinkedIn, he didn’t say he was “building a PLN.” ” He was connecting with others.

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Technology OER Flipped Classroom Learning 328

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. The most recent example occurred this week, when OER company Lumen Learning announced a partnership with one of the country’s largest textbook distributors, Follet Corporation.

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OER LMS Company Course 107

Iterating Toward Openness

JUNE 28, 2016

Creating and sharing OER did not harm their ability to succeed in accomplishing their core missions – the education of their students. And there are many reasons to believe that their efforts in creating and sharing OER actually advanced their core missions. 18) for the creation of OER-based degrees (see SEC.

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OER Instructional Materials Course Resources 84

EdTech Magazine

JUNE 25, 2018

As K–12 institutions digitally progress, slow data sharing between parents, teachers and administrators is leaving all players increasingly frustrated as they are forced to wait for important information sent through what is quickly becoming an outdated system. This is not just a hypothetical example. by Eli Zimmerman.

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Competency Based Learning OER Data Comparison 277

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

As I’ve been (re-)reading OER adoption research through a more critical lens I’m seeing a recurring pattern of significant threats to validity in the designs of studies purporting to measure the impact of OER adoption on student outcomes. Many research studies fail to address the way instructors end up using OER.

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OER Outcomes Study Course 94

Teacher Reboot Camp

JUNE 27, 2016

The panelists discussed current models of blended learning and provided visual examples of what these models looked like in various schools, classroom structure, open education resources (OER), learning management systems (LMS), creating flipped videos, flipped instruction , workflow, and challenges.

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Blended Learning OER eBook LMS 218

Iterating Toward Openness

FEBRUARY 4, 2019

We have a similar problem in the open educational resources (OER) space. Many people are in the habit of referring to OER as a commons. OER are not like the shared resources at the center of traditional commons. However, OER are not CPRs. This principle fails to apply to OER in multiple ways. We could go on.

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OER Resources Groups Accessibility 103

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 158

Iterating Toward Openness

AUGUST 21, 2019

OER advocacy, like most work, is filled alternately with advances and setbacks. But other responses called the discussion of practice unimaginative and accused me of underestimating the pedagogical change that OER is capable of catalyzing. And why aren’t they using OER in their classes? A world of tears.

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OER Advocacy Survey Course 137

NeverEndingSearch

MAY 6, 2019

And what does it look like when the librarian, armed with a rich OER toolkit, regularly curates urgently needed, high-quality, flexible, no- or low-cost digital tools and content across the curriculum, expertly modeling that practice for the entire learning community?

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OER Future Ready Case Study Outcomes 80

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 11, 2020

In the first installment on Monday, I explained how a fundamental failure to understand copyright makes the definition of OER in the new UNESCO recommendation nonsensical. In the second installment yesterday, I described how it appears that many in the OER community have taken their eye off the ball of student learning.

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OER Case Study System Strategy 78

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 30, 2018

Today I’m going to focus on ISKME and OER Commons. From their website: ISKME’s OER initiatives aim to grow a sustainable culture of sharing and continuous improvement among educators at all levels. In addition to their widely used OER search and discovery service, ISKME provides a range of other services.

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OER Libraries Training System 74

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 4, 2024

Many institutions charge students a fee associated with their OER courses as a way of funding the institutions’ OER efforts. For example, Kansas State University’s Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative course fee is a $10 fee that is payed by students in courses that use OER and other free, traditionally copyrighted resources.

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OER Advocacy Policies Course 79

Iterating Toward Openness

APRIL 25, 2019

I spend most of my time doing fairly tactical thinking and working focused on moving OER adoption forward in the US higher education space. In this vision of the world, OER replace traditionally copyrighted, expensive textbooks for all primary, secondary, and post-secondary courses. My end goal isn’t to increase OER adoption.

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OER Course Company Smartphone 84

EdTech4Beginners

APRIL 2, 2017

CMS – Content Management System (a tool to build websites and apps). LMS – Learning Management System (software that runs and manages educational programs). OER – Open Educational Resource (this can be any online materials that are free to use). OS – Operation system (e.g. BYOL – Bring Your Own Learning.

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EdTech VLE CMS OER 189

Iterating Toward Openness

MAY 8, 2019

The most recent issue of IRRODL included an article titled Effectiveness of OER Use in First-Year Higher Education Students’ Mathematical Course Performance: A Case Study , by Juan I. This was justified by the fact that there is a lack of empirical evidence to support expanding the use of OER. Venegas-Muggli and Werner Westermann.

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Khan Academy OER Case Study System 131

Iterating Toward Openness

AUGUST 8, 2018

Yesterday, Phil Hill wrote about OpenStax’s new method for calculating the savings students see when their faculty adopt OER. If the average student using OpenStax is spending $30 on a printed OpenStax book or on a homework system from an OpenStax Partner, why not decrease the savings estimate by $30? Or whatever the number is?

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OER Data Course Study 74