OER Course Collaboratory/Existing resources/Introduction to OER Tutorials

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Introduction to Open Educational Resources
Tutorial
Developed by Judy Baker, Ph.D.
Re-Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0, 2008
MS-Word version available for download under CC-BY-SA-NC license


Contents

Module 1: Overview

Module 2: Open Courseware

Module 3: Copyright, Fair Use, and TEACH Act

Module 4: Tools to Identify and Select OER

Module 5: Accessibility and Universal Design

Module 6: OER Discipline-Specific Sources

Module 7: Use of Primary Sources

Module 8: Sources of Open Textbooks

Module 9: OER Development and Collaboration

Module 10: OER Delivery, Storage, and Organization

Module 11: Support for OER Use on Campus

Module 12: Future of OER Movement


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Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com
Module 1: Overview

Definitions

Open Educational Resources (OER) are “digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research.” This term was first adopted at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the Hewlett Foundation (source Wikipedia).

A definition of OER from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is:

"OER are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge."

If you are unfamiliar with the terms used in this course, you may want to bookmark the following glossaries.

The term OER has been used to refer to learning materials such as:

Some more current definitions of Open Educational Resources place just as much emphasis on the PROCESS of creating open knowledge and promoting least restrictive knowledge-sharing as on the content itself.  For example, although content in this tutorial was originally only available from an online course that has an open license, it did NOT fit the definition of an OER because it required registration and was password-protected.  By contrast, the following courses are considered OER because they do not limit access:

Another example is the graphic at the top of this Module from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com.  This graphic is probably NOT considered to be an OER because it does not have an open license that promotes sharing and remixing.  And, as the graphic above implies, use and development of OER is somewhat of a balancing act between competing interests and needs, especially with regard to intellectual property.

The Open Knowledge Foundation has defined open knowledge as "A piece of knowledge is open if you are free to use, reuse, and redistribute it.” A full definition is available.

Be sure that you understand the difference between learning content that is freely available and OER.

Although a resource may be accessible for FREE over the Internet, it may be protected by a copyright that does not permit reuse and reproduction for either commercial or non-commercial purposes. For example, PBS.org allows educators to freely use images and text from their website under certain conditions however some of the restrictions mean that many would not consider it a repository of OER.  Another example is an Organic Chemistry textbook that is freely available but could not be considered an open textbook due to its copyright restrictions.  OER are typically distributed as public domain or with an open license that allows others to share, adapt and use the content freely. 

Ideally, OER repositories (such as OpenDOAR) should clearly display the policies for inclusion of OER to ensure that the content has some sort of open license that permits sharing and reuse.  We will explore this issue further in the Module on Fair Use, Copyright, and TEACH Act. 

Background

The Open Educational Resources movement is part of a global effort to make knowledge available to all. The UNESCO's Virtual University Forum provides an overview about definitions, initiatives, and community-building. OER is seen by some as a means to provide students in developing countries with access to affordable learning content.  For more about this global effort, see this article by Sally M. Johnstone, founding Director of Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET), in Educause Quarterly titled: Open Educational Resources Serve the World.  Richard Baraniuk, a Rice University professor, presents a vision for free, global education and introduces Connexions, an open-access publishing service, in this 19 minute video recorded at the TED Conference in February 2006.   

This tutorial will focus primarily on the OER movement in the United States, however. If you want to become better informed about the global OER movement, go to UNESCO's IIEP to request membership in the international OER Community of Interest.

Open Educational Resources: Toward a New Educational Paradigm by Dr. Laura Petrides and Dr. Cynthia Jimes (October 2006) is a short article about the purpose of open educational resources, the challenges to realizing the potential of OER, and calls, and future research

The Hewlett Foundation has taken a pioneering role in the development and use of OER with its support of many initiatives: "The Open Educational Resources movement began in 2001 when the Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations jointly funded MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), the first institution committed to making all of its course materials freely available. Since then, more than 60 additional institutions have launched OpenCourseWare Web sites." For background about Hewlett Foundation's involvement in the OER movement, watch this presentation by Catherine Casserly, Program Officer: Open Educational Resources: Unlocking Knowledge to the Global Community.  Just some of the many OER initiatives supported by the Hewlett Foundation include:

Video Overview of OER

As an alternative to reading text, you may prefer to get an overview of OER by watching Dr. Cable Green's webinar video: Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources Feb. 11, 2008.[1]

Case Study

In his May 2006 article Bye the Book My year of teaching environmental science without a textbook, Eric Pallant describes how he and co-professor Terry Bensel experimented with teaching their Introduction to Environmental Science course at Allegheny College with no textbook. Instead they used a variety of open educational resources. Based on self-report, 41 of 46 students in their first-semester class read the same or more than they would have in a textbook. The experiment proved successful enough that the entire academic department has embraced the concept of OER. Faculty have distributed the work of collecting and banking websites for common use.  We will address the use of Open Textbooks in more detail in another Module.Other case studies are being collected at the Case Study Research Project wiki.

Benefits and Disadvantages

In the recommended reading, you will some of the benefits of OER.  These include:

  • Fosters pedagogical innovation and relevance that avoids teaching from the textbook
  • Broadens use of alternatives to textbooks while maintaining instructional quality
  • Lowers cost of course materials for students

Think of what other benefits there might be.

Some disadvantages of OER include:

  • Quality of available OER materials inconsistent
  • Materials may not meet Section 508 ADA accessibility or SCORM requirements and must be modify to bring into compliance
  • No common standard for review of OER accuracy and quality
  • Need to check accuracy of content
  • Customization necessary to match departmental and/or college curriculum requirements
  • Technical requirements to access vary
  • Technological determinism created by the delivery tool

OER Mini-Handbooks

An example of OER development in action is the OER Mini-handbook series.  The Center for Sustainable and Open Learning (COSL) and the Hewlett Foundation sponsor this is a dynamic wiki at wikieducator.org as a guide for those who are new to OER development and licensing. Take a look at the different mini-handbooks available for:

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Instructions: If you want an additional introduction to OER, read the first half of this OLCOS tutorial.

OLCOS Intro to OER Tutorial

Activities

Experience

1. Get connected and become a part of the OER movement community:

2.  Create a visual representation or Mind Map of your current understanding of OER.

Reflect: Learning Dialogue Question

  • Which advantages and disadvantages to using OER are most important to you and why?  What other benefits and challenges can you add?

Apply

Now that you have a general idea of what OER is all about, you should be ready to make a couple of decisions:

1. Do you want to learn more about OER?

  • Decide which Modules you want to complete in this course.
  • Decide the order in which you want to complete the Modules that makes the most sense for your current learning needs.

2. Do you want to get the most out of this learning experience?

  • Invite a colleague to join you in this tutorial.
  • Complete all the exercises listed in the Activities component of each Module.

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Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  1. Define and describe OER.
  2. List the advantages and disadvantages of OER use.

Success Indicators

  1. Learner memberships in OER community websites.
  2. Learner-generated posting to open forum about OER issues.

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Readings

Recommended:

Optional:

Supplemental Resources

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Module 2: Open Courseware

Introduction

The Open CourseWare movement began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002 and has now spread to over 120 other universities worldwide.  MIT first announced its Open Courseware program in 2001. The OCW provides open access to course materials for up to 1,550 MIT courses, representing 34 departments and all five MIT schools. The goal is to include materials from all MIT courses by 2008. MIT OCW's goals are to: 1) Provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world, and 2) Extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the opencourseware concept.

MIT has been so successful with its Open Courseware initiative that it now provides a How-To site for institutions wanting to launch their own Open Courseware project. Making the Case for Open Courseware is outlined by MIT on their How-To site in terms of -

 Benefits for users and for global society

 Benefits for the institution and its community

 Open courseware cost components

 Answers to common concerns

Many other Open Courseware projects are now underway: Top 100 Open Courseware Projects.  As far as I know, the only community college to offer Open Courseware is Foothill College: see the SOFIA Project.

According to MIT: The open courseware concept is a part of the larger movement that promotes free and unrestricted access to knowledge. An opencourseware site provides open access to the primary teaching materials for courses taught at educational institutions, enabling educators to draw on the materials for teaching purposes, and students and self-learners to use the materials for the development of their own personal knowledge. Furthermore, MIT defines an open courseware site as:

  • Publishes course materials created by faculty (and sometimes other colleagues or students) to support teaching and learning
  • Is IP-cleared, meaning that the open courseware publisher has the rights to make the materials available under open terms and that nothing in the materials infringes the copyrights of others
  • Offers the materials free of charge for non-commercial use
  • Is universally accessible via the Web
  • Permits use, reuse, adaptation (derivative works), and redistribution of the materials by others

The Open Courseware Consortium "is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware."  According to the Open Courseware Consortium, an Open CourseWare site is a “free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses...is available for use and adaptation under an open license...does not typically provide certification or access to instructors.” 

Case Studies

The detailed MIT Open Courseware Story is available for downloading as a 36 page PDF.

A project is underway in New Zealand to provide an open course repository.  The goal of the New Zealand Open Educational Resources project is to increase the quality of eLearning materials, increase flexibility in their re-use and significantly reduce the duplication of investment in their design, development and production. The objectives of the NZ OER project are:

  1. To develop some 'proof of concept' courseware that is freely available to all tertiary education institutions in New Zealand.
  2. To develop a model to initiate future projects for the benefit of the education sector at a system-wide level, on the basis of a successful pilot.

OCW Sites

You can use the Open CourseWare Finder to search for OER course content from:

Other universities with open courseware include:

Open Course Sites

Wikiversity is an online group of educators engaged in a collaborative learning effort using wiki software, which makes collaboration easy. Take the guided tour to discover more.

HippoCampus, a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), provides high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge.

Free University Lectures has a search function that makes it easier to find podcasts and videos of lectures in a specific discipline, however, it only includes four categories: physics, chemistry, computer science, and mathematics. The Free University Lectures blog provides up-to-date information about open courses.

Award winning podcasts from the University of Bath's public lecture series feature leading names from the worlds of science, humanities and engineering talking about the latest research in their field.

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Overview of Open Access

A Very Brief Introduction to Open AccessInstructions: This is "A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access" by Peter Suber.

If you are curious about how the Open Access Movement has evolved, take a look at this detailed timeline which traces events from 1996 to 2007.

Timeline of the Open Access Movement


How can you promote Open Access

Student Action

Students can participate in a variety of efforts to support the Open Access and OER Movements:[2]

Find out what students can do to promote Open Access[3]

Free Culture

Get Involved

Textbook Revolution

Textbook Revolution is the web’s source for free educational materials. This is a student-run, volunteer-operated website started in response to the textbook industry’s constant drive to maximize profits instead of educational value.

Make Textbooks More Affordable - Student CALPIRG 

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Faculty can support the movement to protect faculty intellectual property rights from the dictates of professional scholarly journals by getting involved with the Open Access Journal movement.  New publishing model have arisen for faculty who are unwilling to sign over copyright of their work to journals.  Under the new models, faculty can make their high-quality scholarly content available free via the Internet.

To find out more about Open Access Journal Publishing and Digital Repositories / Author Self-Archiving, visit http://www.library.uiuc.edu/scholcomm/pubmodels.htm

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Activities

Experience

  1. Use the Open CourseWare Finder to search for Open Courseware in your teaching discipline.
  2. Listen to a lecture podcast at Stanford on iTunes, Berkeley Lectures or Yale on iTunes.
  3. Participate in the Wikiversity Colloquium.

Reflect

  1. Do you believe that your own college/university should have Open Courseware?  Why or why not? (If your own college already has Open Courseware, please tell us how it is perceived by the faculty and students.) 

Apply

  1. Develop a lesson plan that repurposes learning content from OCW for your own teaching.
  2. Consider adding your own course to Wikiuniversity. Use the tutorial provided.

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Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  1. Identify sources of open courseware for use in their own teaching disciplines.
  2. Locate at lesson in an open course to modify for use in teaching.

Success Indicators

  1. Posted lesson plan that repurposes learning content from OCW for learner's own teaching.[[Image:]]

Readings

Recommended:

Optional:

Supplemental Resources

Module 3: Copyright, Fair Use, and TEACH Act

Introduction

Although documents, pictures, audio, and other information are all easy to copy and/or download from the Internet, it is your responsibility to understand and respect the laws that protect the author(s) of electronic information. The copyright laws that govern information in all formats are complex. It is impossible to reduce them to a few simple rules. We encourage you to visit the pages listed here. They have been prepared by legal and other experts on the subject of copyright and can help you learn to decide for yourself whether it is appropriate to use electronic information sources in your work.The first and most important rule is, "If you have any doubt about the legality of using copyrighted information, don't!"But please note that this is an area of the law that is changing rapidly. All materials recommended here are intended to help you make good decisions. Good decisions related to copyright will always require critical thinking on the part of the user.  A basic understanding of copyright, fair use, the TEACH Act, and intellectual property is necessary before using and developing OER in order to minimize your legal risks. 

Copyright

Did you know that the copyright notice © is no longer required for works published after March 1989?  This means that the absence of a copyright notice does not necessarily mean the work is within the public domain. If you are unfamiliar with copyright issues, you are encouraged to visit one or more of the many online tutorials exist which address these topics.

The recent lawsuit by publishers against Georgia State University is a cautionary tale for those who chose to ignore the legal risks of digitally distributing copyrighted materials to their students. For the chilling details, see the actual lawsuit is available from the article: Publishers Sue Georgia State over Digital Distribution. Textbook Torrents is a controversial peer-to-peer site that allows students to share digital versions of their textbooks that has drawn fire from publishers.


Watch this video clip that addresses the challenges faced by faculty when distributing copyrighted material from various sources: The Case of Dr. No. Many basic tutorials about copyright are available:

If you are seeking more in-depth discussion about copyright issues of relevance to educators, read this provocative paper "Are Copyrights a Textbook Scam? Alternatives to Financing Textbook Production in the 21st Century" by Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

For a bit of comic relief from all the legal information, take a look at this popular Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. video.  Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University created a funny video that uses fair use-sized clips of Disney characters to review basic copyright principles.

Fair Use

Recognize that Fair Use is a legally defensible position based on the rulings derived from succeeding court cases. This means that it is not a set of hard and fast rules, but a set of guidelines to follow and in case legal action, educators can demonstrate compliance with the law and due diligence.Under Fair Use you can ask yourself some questions and by the answers, decide if you're on the right side of the law.  The fair use doctrine, as codified in §17 U.S.C. 107, sets forth four general factors to be considered when evaluating whether a proposed use of a copyrighted work is a fair use and thus, does not require permission from the copyright holder.   The four factors are:

  1. What is the purpose of the proposed use?
  2. What is the nature of the copyright work to be used?
  3. How much of the copyrighted work will be used?
  4. What is the effect on the market or potential market for the copyrighted work?

This is a good checklist to assess your intended use of copies against the Fair Use doctrine.

TEACH Act

The TEACH Act updates copyright law for digital online education as a compromise effort to address the copyright restriction disparities between digital classroom and the traditional classroom in terms of performances and displays. TEACH Toolkit provides checklists and a “best practices” as well as basic information.  The American Library Association has a handy "highlights" sheet available (PDF format).  Section 110(1) of the Copyright Act covers the fair use exemption for face-to-face teaching, while 110(2), outlines fair use exemptions for distance education which are more limited. 


Under the Teach Act, faculty can use copyrighted material in their online courses without seeking the author's permission under the following circumstances:

  • The college must be accredited and nonprofit.
  • The college must have an internal policy on use of copyrighted material and on copyright law.
  • The college must provide printed or online resources for faculty members that describe their rights and responsibilities under copyright law.
  • The material must not have been originally intended for educational use.
  • The material must have been lawfully acquired
  • The material must be an integral part of the class session.
  • Reasonable precautions must be made to restrict access to the copyrighted content to students enrolled in the course.
  • Other reasonable controls must be used to prevent students from disseminating the material after viewing it.
  • If a digital version of the material is readily available for use at the institution, then the instructor cannot convert an analog version to digital form for use in an online course.
  • The college must inform students that the material may be protected by copyright law.

The Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization Act of 2002 (TEACH) allows students and teachers at an accredited, nonprofit, educational institution to use copyrighted work for technology-mediated instruction if certain additional conditions are met.

The guidelines are:

  • Dramatic and non-dramatic works are treated differently (dramatic works have clear instructions that indicate intention for performance)
    • Non-dramatic works may be used in their entirety
  • Dramatic and displayable works must used in "reasonable portions"—what would be normal for use in one session of a face to face class
  • Works produced or marketed primarily for performance or display as part of mediated instructional activities transmitted via digital networks OR secured by means of unlawful copying (copies you know or reasonably should know were not lawfully made or acquired) are not covered by TEACH
  • Only under the direction or supervision of an instructor
  • Must be part of the class teaching session
  • As an integral part of systematic instructional activities, mediated or directed by instructor
  • Directly related to the content and of material assistance in teaching that content
  • Must only be available to the students registered for the course for the duration of the course
  • The institution must make every effort to limit student access to the duration of the course and not beyond
  • If the copyright holder has instituted technological means to keep copies from being made or distributed beyond the course duration, the institution may not interfere with those technologies

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(Thanks to Tahiya Marome for her assistance in the development of this Module)

Larry Lessig Video about Copyright and Creativity

Instructions: View Larry Lessig's TED presentation: "How creativity is being strangled by the law"

Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law

Licenses for Open Content

In OER training materials, UNESCO defines Open content as:"any kind of creative work (including articles, pictures, audio, and video) or engineering work that is published in a format that explicitly allows the copying and the modifying of the information by anyone."  Technically, it is royalty free, share alike and may or may not allow commercial redistribution. Content can be either in the public domain or under an open license like one of the Creative Commons licenses, which allow anyone to reuse the document under certain conditions. Under these restrictions which often restrict the use to non commercial, anyone can produce a derivative work.

Types of licenses

  1. Creative Commons (CC) License (11 versions)
  2. GNU Free Document license
  3. Open Content License
  4. Open Publication License

UNESCO provides a grid of open content licensing options (a more detailed version is available from FreedomDefined.org) that can help you choose the open license appropriate to your own OER. A shorter, more basic list is available from WikiEducator.  These licensing option lists will be helpful when you are ready to make a decision about how to license your own OER.

Creative Commons

Prominent in efforts to provide licensing options for open content is Creative Commons (CC).  Creative Commons is an internationally recognized, nonprofit organization that provides definitions, tools, and advice to creators of online materials regarding the use of their work by others. CC provides authors with free tools to manage their intellectual property.

For a quick overview, watch this video (3 minutes) about Creative Commons licensing: Wanna Work Together (cc). A CC license allows others to reproduce a licensed work when they give credit to the license holder. The CC website has a tool that generates licenses (in HTML format) based on chosen criteria. Educause provides good summary of 7 Things Series You Should Know about Creative Commons. 

As you learn more about Creative Commons licenses, be sure that you understand the difference between those licenses which are open (Creative Commons Attribution and Attribution Share Alike) and those which are not (Creative Commons licenses with No Derivatives or Non-commercial options).  Watch a video tutorial by Ahrash Bissel, Executive Director of ccLearn, about the continuum of Creative Commons licenses.

As recently stated by Jonathan Grey, "While the latter do afford people more choice about what can be done with their work - there are problems with interoperability, and do not serve well as the basis of an ecosystem of textbooks and textbook content that may be built upon, modified and redistributed without restriction. For example, publishers may not have the incentive to add value to existing content if they would be unable to re-distribute this in a commercial context."


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 Take some time and attention to clearly understand the distinctions between the different license versions provided by Creative Commons.  Some of the distinctions have generated lively debate within the OER movement community, especially by those who develop OER and those who manage OER repositories.

Just one example of a Creative Commons license is Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported which means that the work can be used to share and adapt in any country but only with attribution of the author, for non-commercial purposes, with the condition that others may use the adaptation for share and adapt.

Creative Commons has launched a new initiative called ccLearn to create a single, standard licensing framework that can encompass all open educational resources.  For details about ccLearn, see CC Learn: Promoting Interoperability Among Open Educational Resources Repositories.

Evidence of progress toward standardization is MERLOT's recent revision to its Acceptable Use Policy.  The revision includes new conditions that relate to the use of Creative Commons licensing policies for online learning materials.  Reasons cited by MERLOT are: "1) to encourage creators of online materials to share their work with others who might wish to reuse the materials in creative ways, and 2) to ensure that contributions of online materials by MERLOT members to the MERLOT community are protected from misuse and abuse."  

OLCOS Choose a License for OER Tutorial

Instructions: For specifics about how to choose a license for OER you have developed, see this OLCOS tutorial.

OLCOS Choose a License for OER Tutorial

ISKME Tutorial: OER Licensing

Instructions: Complete the ISKME Tutorial: OER Licensing and Conditions of Use

OER Licensing and Conditions of Use

Activities

Experience

  1. Watch Dr. No Returns! It is a video clip in which an instructor would like to use the TEACH Act to provide music from various sources to a History of Music course through a password protected web site.
  2. Use Checklist for the TEACH Act to determine whether or not your planned use of learning materials are suitable as OER is in compliance with the TEACH Act.
  3. Use the EduSource Canada Public Domain Wizard to determine if the learning materials you plan to use are in the public domain.
  4. Use Checklist for Fair Use to determine whether or not your planned use of learning materials are suitable as OER in terms of fair use. 

Reflect: Learning Dialogue Question

  1. How do fair use and the TEACH Act apply to the use of OER in your teaching? 
  2. At the core of OER use and re-use are legal issues surrounding the sharing, use, and re-use of OER as a way to sustain and grow the OER movement. How does the shift from proprietary to participatory impact OER?
  3. Can you think of license options that Creative Commons is currently missing that would benefit the OER movement? 

Apply

  1. Choose an OER License for learning materials you might develop and share.
  2. Read about how intellectual property and fair use impact decisions to publish scholarly works at Connexions. Decide if you want to contribute to Connexions.

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Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  1. Define copyright, fair use, the TEACH Act, and intellectual property.
  2. List open licensing options.

Success Indicators

  1. Determine the appropriateness of using learning materials for OER in terms of fair use.
  2. Creative Commons license selected by the learner for OER developed by the learner.

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Readings

Recommended:

Optional:

Supplemental Resources

Module 4: Tools to Identify and Select OER

Introduction

Several resources are available on the Internet that provide teachers with tools to identify and select OER for use in instruction. Some of these are:

Criteria for Selection of OER

As you search for OER using these tools and repositories, consider what criteria you will use to select appropriate OER for your own use.  For example, take a look at the criteria available from MERLOT’s Peer Review process.  See Assessing the quality of open education resource based wikis.  Watch this video lecture about educational quality assessment.

Possible Criteria/Guidelines for Selection of Materials

  • Quality of content, literary merit and format
  • Timeliness
  • Favorable reviews
  • Permanence/lasting value
  • Authority: author
  • Scope and depth
  • Physical quality
  • Formats available: print, CD-ROM, online, etc.
  • Reading level
  • Accessibility

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OER Commons

OER Commons is one of several Internet resources where you can identify and select OER. With a free membership, you can add tags, ratings, reviews, comments, and favorites to your own portfolio. You can post to discussion, blog, and wiki areas, and see how others are using OER. OER Commons is created and produced by ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. It is generously supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and represents dozens of collaborations with OER partners and communities across the globe. The multi-tasking OER Commons site is well worth a long visit.

MERLOT

MERLOT is a pioneer in the development of searchable and shareable online learning materials for higher education. The site provides collection of peer reviewed learning materials created by registered members. MERLOT provides criteria for peer-review of learning materials submitted. Take a Tour of the new MERLOT. Searches in MERLOT can be sorted by date, reviews ratings, title, author, and material type. A tutorial about how to search for learning materials using MERLOT is available from the SUNY Teaching, Learning, and Technology Program.


MERLOT has recently revised its Acceptable Use Policy to include Creative Commons licensing.  However, much of the content currently available via MERLOT is not available as OER for sharing and remixing without explicit permission from the authors.

Connexions

Connexions has a repository of OER that are searchable by subject, language, popularity, title, keyword, and author. The repository contains 3925 reusable modules woven into 211 collections. The content in Connexions comes in two formats: modules, which are like small "knowledge chunks," and courses, which are collections of modules. The Connexions Creative Commons open license allows for free use and reuse of all its content.

FREE

FREE: Federal Resources for Educational Excellence provides links to hundreds of education resources from or supported by the U.S. government.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons provides a way to find shareable photos, music, text, books, and other educational material utilizing Creative Commons licenses. A Content Curators wiki area is available that provides a list of curators of Creative Commons-licensed content. Users are invited to contribute to and edit this list themselves.

OpenDOAR

OpenDOAR (The Directory of Open Access Repositories) provides a vetted listing of Open Access Repositories (OAR) across the world. OpenDOAR provides helpful information about each listing that details OER policy, categories, and metadata.  OpenDOAR is being developed and maintained by the University of Nottingham as part of a portfolio of work in Open Access and repositories under the SHERPA umbrella.

You can search for the full-text of material held in open access repositories listed in the Directory using Search Repository Contents or use OpenDOAR to find repositories or groups of repositories that fit particular needs using Find tool.

Read the criteria used for inclusion of content repositories, then use OpenDOAR to find content repositories in your discipline.  Take note of the policies for each repository before you decide if the content is truly OER or merely freely available.

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a non-profit service was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format.  In addition to its Open Educational Resources, it features:

  • The Wayback Machine - Browse through web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago
  • Software - Includes a broad range of software related materials
  • Moving Images - Contains thousands of digital movies
  • Audio - Contains over a hundred thousand free digital recordings
  • Texts - Collection open to the community for the contribution of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses

OER Repositories

WikiEducator provides several tools for identification and use of OER including the Exemplary Collection of Open eLearning Content Repositories.

LoLa Exchange

Lola Exchange provides learning objects and learning activities available for searching by topic, title, discipline, or author. Disciplines listed are Mathematics, Science and Technology, Social Sciences, Business, Arts, Education, and Humanities. All materials are reviewed according to standard criteria by volunteers.

COL Knowledge Finder

COL Knowledge Finder is a service that searches reliable sources of information in open and distance learning and provides organization tools. Emphasis is on international development goals like poverty alleviation, health and education for all. The COL Knowledge Finder service is provided by The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) which is an intergovernmental organization created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies. To use the search tool, click on "Search". Then follow the guidelines on the screen. More details are available from the Orientation. Training videos for effective searching and use of the COL Knowledge Finder tools are available.

Internet Archive

View this 2 minute video about the Internet Archive Open Content Alliance. 

Curriki

Curriki is a global education and learning community dedicated to providing quality learning materials worldwide. Learning materials can be searched by the following topics: Arts, Educational Technology, Foreign Languages, Health, Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and Vocational Education. A re-launch of the site is planned soon to add the following new features:

  • Access information, tools, and resources from the new member home page.
  • View and comment on other members' learning resources.
  • Edit and collaborate on learning materials, and build collections and resources with Currikulum Builder.
  • Develop content in the Currikulum Builder with templates.
  • Manage your own contributions and collections, as well as your user profile and blog, using your personalized space in MyCurriki.

Take a tour of CURRIKI.  View the CNBC video interview with Scott McNealy about Curriki.

Edu2.0

Take a tour of Edu2.0 to discover all browsable shared course content organized by topic. Resources include quizzes, webquests, presentations, projects, experiments, courses, classes, curricula, audio, video, powerpoint, excel and other kinds of attachments.

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OLCOS Search and Find OER Tutorial

Instructions: For more practical information, advice, and guidance how to search and find open content, see this OLCOS tutorial.

OLCOS Search and Find OER Tutorial

OER Commons Tutorial: Finding OER Materials

Finding OER Materials

Collection of Open Content Repositories

Instructions: Exemplary Collection of Open eLearning Content Repositories

Collection of Open Content Repositories

Activities

Experience

  1. Review the criteria available from MERLOT’s Peer Review process.
  2. Go to OER Commons, Connexions, and FREE to search for content in your teaching discipline. 
  3. View the Gallery of Sample MERLOT From the Author Snapshots
  4. Go to the MERLOT website.
    1. View a few Personal Collections posted by others.
    2. Become a member of MERLOT.
    3. Create your own MERLOT Personal Collection.
  5. Visit the OWL Institute Portal to search for resources, people and communities; browse courses and home pages or create your own.  
  6. Participate in the latest OER Commons Survey and check the results.
  7. Become a member of Curriki and volunteer to -
    • Contribute: As a registered user of Curriki, use MyCurriki to add your own material: books, lesson plans, tests, blog, etc. Make your materials available to the Curriki community. Add other Curriki materials to your collection and experiment with the editing tools.
    • Collaborate: Invite colleagues and friends to join Curriki and work with you on improving materials in the repository or adding new content. This fall we will launch new tools to facilitate collaboration.
    • Review: Browse the Curriki repository for subject matter that interests you, read the material, and provide comments via the Curriki reviewer template. Learn More
    • Translate: Apply your language skills to translate the pages into another language. Post your translated pages in the repository and send an email to translations@curriki.org with the information about your work.
    • Test: New Curriki software releases need beta testers. Email beta@curriki.org for information on the latest release, new features, and how to provide feedback.

Reflect: Learning Dialogue Question

  1. Which OER repositories do consider most valuable to you and why?
  2. Which tools available to identify and select OER do you consider most valuable to you and why?  Identify specific features that distinguish this tool from the others.

Apply

  1. Review learning materials at OER Commons. Type keywords in the Search box in the upper right corner of the screen to identify at least one OER to review.
    • Click on Save this Search.
    • Sort by Rating. Click on the title of the OER you want to review, then click on View Item.
    • Click on Rate Item to give it your rating.
    • Click on Review Item to submit your review.
  2. Submit your review of some learning materials at MERLOT. You will need to become a member before you can submit your review.
  3. Develop your own criteria for selection of OER.
  4. If you know of a good source of open educational resources, submit the Internet address for inclusion on the COL Knowledge Finder submit-a-site page.

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Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  1. Identify resources for use of primary sources as learning materials in their own teaching disciplines.
  2. Locate at least one primary source for use in teaching.
  3. Develop a lesson plan using primary sources.

Success Indicators

  1. OER added to learner's own online collection or portfolio.
  2. OER review posted by the learner.

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Readings

Recommended:

Optional:

Supplemental Resources

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Module 5: Accessibility and Universal Design

Background

Certain accessibility requirements must be addressed when selecting and developing OER for electronic dissemination to students.

  • By law, ADA Section 508, learning materials, including interfaces, images, sounds, multimedia elements, and all other forms of information, must be made available for used by anyone, regardless of disability. Detailed information about accessibility guidelines are available at Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). 
  • Accessible OER can be used by a greater number of students than OER that do not follow accessibility guidelines. 
  • By following accessibility requirements, OER can be developed that require less modification for reuse.

Accessibility

Certain accessibility requirements must be addressed when developing OER for electronic dissemination to students. For example, see Distance Education: Access Guidelines for Students with Disabilities from the Chancellor's Office California Community Colleges.

See this microtutorial about Section 508: http://21cif.imsa.edu/tutorials/micro/mm/508

Detailed information about accessibility guidelines are available at Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Utah State University, Web Accessibility in Mind (Webaim) offers various "How To" information and support on creating accessible web sites. Web authors can find a Section checklist, sample HTML markup and various articles and courses on accessible web design.

The Accessible Web Publishing Wizard[javascript:void(0);/*1208751086828*/ ]simplifies the task of converting PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and (in the future) Excel spreadsheets to accessible HTML through an easy-to-use user interface and automation of many of the details of conversion.

Art of ALT is a series of online lessons about building accessibility into Web-based humanities content. These lessons provide information to help build Web sites whose content is available to those with disabilities.

A-Prompt is an accessibility evaluation and repair tool from the University of Toronto in cooperation with the Trace Center and CAST. A demonstration version is available for download.  A-Prompt lists what it considers to be errors and offers a chance to correct each one.

My Web My WayTips for Students about how to make the web easier to use

Accessibility Evaluation and Repair Tools

Accessibility Training and Resources

Accessibility Checklist-508 Compliance

Resources for Checking Accessibility and Captioning Multi-Media

Accessible Video and Multimedia trainingis available from the US Government: "Video and multimedia products can greatly enhance training and other programs in your agency. However, without the ability to hear what is being spoken, or to hear dialogue without the necessary visual context, these products can be confusing or useless to people with disabilities. Learn how to create and evaluate video and multimedia products that are accessible to all audiences. Specifically, you'll discover the elements and steps for adding audio descriptions and captioning to any product."

Universal Design

Learn how to make your online course and learning materials available to ALL students regardless of learning style or disability. 

"Universal design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design. The intent of universal design is to simplify life for everyone by making products, communications, and the built environment more usable by as many people as possible at little or no extra cost. Universal design benefits people of all ages and abilities." - Center for Universal Design

How-to’s and Demos

Distance Learning Accessibility Issues

For those of you involved with distance learning programs, take a look at this 12 minute video on Real Connections: Making Distance Learning Accessible to Everyone. Some other resources on this topic include:

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Interoperability

In order for OER to be considered a viable option for faculty, interoperability of open content is necessary so that content can be used across different applications, operating systems, and computers.  For example, widely adopted html language and http protocol standards that enabled most users to view and share content are largely responsible for the traction gained by the Internet. Until OER embraces standards or specification to promote interoperability, efforts to produce and share open content will be inefficient. 

IMS Specifications

Currently, IMS specifications for Learning Management Systems have been largely adopted by many organizations. Coordination and promotion of interoperability standards, such as XML, can facilitate the efficient dissemination of open content.

XHTML

One way for OER developers to improve the likelihood of interoperability for their OER is to use the xml editing tools provided by Connexions.  Simply by posting OER to Connexions, the content is converted into xhtml which is compatible with most systems for sharing and disseminating OER.

eXe

Also, OER developers can use eXe, an eLearning XHTML editor, to convert their content into an interoperable format.  A tutorial about uses of eXe is available.


Other resources about OER interoperability include:

 

Open Publication Structure (OPS) 2.0 v0.9871.0

 Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data

Interoperability Sprint 2008 (OER)

 Tool for converting HTML documents into XHTML - HTML Tidy

Activities

Experience

  1. WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues. Submit an OER URL for Accessibility Verification and get a detailed report

Reflect: Learning Dialogue Question

  • Who should be responsible for ensuring that OER are developed with ADA Section 508 accessibility requirements and/or interoperability in mind?

Apply

  1. Find an OER that is out of compliance with ADA Section 508 accessibility requirements, then remix it to make it in compliance.  Repost your remixed version.

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Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  1.  List what is necessary to be in compliance with ADA Section 508 accessibility laws when developing OER for electronic dissemination to student?

Success Indicators

  1.   Learner will post OER that are accessible.

Readings

Module 6: OER Discipline-Specific Sources

Learning Objects

Learning objects are:

  • Web-based, self-contained, small chunks of learning
  • small enough to be embedded in a learning activity, lesson, unit or course
  • flexible, portable, and adaptable, and can be used in multiple learning environments and across disciplines

A number of OER and learning object repositories of on the internet provide a means to search for learning materials by topic and academic subject matter. The Center for International Education at UW-Milwaukee provides a thorough list of learning object repositories. One example is the Co-operative Learning Object Exchange (CLOE).

Images, Audio, and Video

For sources of images, see -

For audio, see -

For video, see -

Development Gateway Foundation

The Development Gateway Foundation DG Community provides an online resources OER portal for development information and knowledge-sharing worldwide. The tools on this website bring together people and organizations around the globe who are working to improve life in developing countries.  You can browse course materials by topic:

  • Agricultural Science
  • Arts
  • Business & Organizational Science
  • Computer Science
  • Civil Engineering
  • Health & Medicine
  • History
  • Humanities
  • Languages
  • Law

Go to Browse Open Course Materials, then try clicking on the More dropdown menu to see topics listed by more discrete categories.

Teacher's Domain

The Teacher's Domain provides multimedia classroom resources and professional development courses to K-12 science educators in Earth and Space Science, Engineering, Life Sciences, and Physical Science.

Other Repositories

Remember that not all of the learning materials in these repositories and sources are OER for modifying but most of the content is freely available under Fair Use and/or with attribution.

Other discipline-specific sources of OER include:

Archeology

Art History

Economics

French

Health

History

Literature

Math

Philosophy

Physics

Psychology

Science

Do It Yourself

Google's Custom Search Engine has made it possible for you to create your own customize search engine that searches only the OER websites you select. A gMail account is required.

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Subject Specific Sources from OLCOS

Instructions: For more sources of discipline-specific sources of OER, check this OLCOS site.

Subject Specific Sources from OLCOS

Public Domain Clipart SourcesUSDA National Wildlife Research CenterNatural resources Conservation Service Photo GalleryU.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Digital Library System)CIA (US) - The World Factbook - MapsImages of American Political HistoryOpenClipart.org[4]U.S. Library of CongressThe Science Education Resource Page ClipArt Index[5]National Agricultural library

Mine SafetyProject Runeberg (Plants)Centers for Disease Control and PreventionNational Cancer Institute - Visuals Online

GRIN (Great Images in NASA)

Activities

Experience

1.   Find learning materials in your teaching discipline at each of the following repositories. Note whether or not a review or rating of the learning materials is available.

2.  Join MERLOT, identify learning materials in your teaching discipline, then add an assignment to a learning object or review a learning object.

3.  Join OER Commons, then make your own posting to the OER Matters Discussions area. Click on OER Matters Localization Forum to answer the following questions:

Reflect: Learning Dialogue Question

  1. How can open education content be localized individual, school, cultural, and national level?
  2. How does the creation of OER facilitate or impedes making content context-specific?
  3. What are the benefits of localizing OER?

Apply

  1. Identify the most useful sources of OER for use in your teaching discipline. Then evaluate the website using the 21st Century Information Fluency Evaluation Wizard.
  2. Develop a lesson plan using these discipline-specific sources. Post your lesson plan to MERLOT

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Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  1. Identify resources for locating OER in their own teaching disciplines.
  2. Develop a lesson plan using a discipline-specific OER.

Success Indicators

  1.  Lesson plan developed which uses OER.

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Readings

Recommended:

Optional:

Supplemental Resources

Module 7: Use of Primary Sources

According to the National Archives, the use of primary documents as learning materials promotes

  1. Student awareness that all written history is subjective in the sense that it reflects an author's interpretation of past events, and
  2. Important analytical skills.

Primary sources include:

  • personal records (birth certificates, death certificates, passports, driver's licenses)
  • federal census figures
  • newspapers
  • local government files
  • letters, personal diaries and memoirs
  • drawings and photographs
  • oral histories
  • artifacts
  • court transcripts

The Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with nearly 130 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include: books and other printed materials, sound and motion picture recordings, photographs, maps, and manuscripts. (Reference: Office of the Librarian)  Complete the Introductory Lesson about primary sources available from the American Memory project at the Library of Congress.

The Smithsonian Source Teaching with Primary Sources is another useful resource for teaching American History. It includes videos, lesson plans, and searchable collection of primary documents.

American Rhetoric makes audio clips of various speeches available from a Speech Bank via the internet. Website content at American Rhetoric is free for educational uses under the Fair Use exception with attribution.

Activities

Experience

  1. Review one of the lesson plans posted at the National Archive's Teaching With Documents: Lesson Plans and look at the Analysis Worksheets.
  2. Create an account at the Smithsonian Source Teaching with Primary Sources so that you can review lessons and add them to your own collection. Click on Historical Perspectives to find a topic of interest to you and find DBQ to add to your collection.
  3. Create an account and login to the Primary Source so that you can set up a Portfolio for storing primary documents that you have identified and selected for use. Contribute a Library of Congress resource link for your subject area. Search the Learning Experiences Collection, select a Learning Experience of interest, and review it.
  4. Create an introductory activity for your own students following the instructions posted at Primary Source Learning.

Reflect: Learning Dialogue Question

If you are not a teacher - 

  1. How would the learning experience be different for a student completing a lesson that uses primary sources versus the same lesson that uses a textbook?

If you are a teacher - 

  1. What challenges might you encounter as a teacher using primary sources instead of textbooks?
  2. What are the advantages and disadvantages to using primary sources for teaching?
  3. What are the most useful resources for teaching with primary sources in your discipline and why?

Apply

  1. Identify a set of primary sources for use in your teaching.
  2. Develop a lesson plan using these primary sources. Post your lesson plan to MERLOT or OER Commons.

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Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  1. Identify resources for use of primary sources as learning materials in their own teaching disciplines.
  2. Locate at least one primary source for use in teaching.
  3. Develop a lesson plan using primary sources.

Success Indicators

  1. Learner will post a lesson plan that uses at least one primary source as an OER for their own teaching.

Readings

Recommended:

Optional:

Supplemental Resources

Module 8: Sources of Open Textbooks

Introduction

Faculty often find the task of selecting reading materials or textbooks for a course daunting.  When selecting an open textbook, the challenge is even greater.  Instructors can ease the selection process by establishing and following criteria such as quantity, quality, accuracy, timeliness, reading level, relevance, and reliability. With appropriate standards in place, the instructor can use some of the many sources of open textbooks that have become available recently.  Fred Beshears of UC Berkeley posed an approach to providing open textbooks to college students in his 2005 article:  The case for Creative Commons Textbooks, in which "traditional colleges and universities would agree to pay membership dues to purchase content from the open universities. OpenTextbook would not develop the content; it would purchase content in bulk. In this sense, OpenTextbook would be similar to consumer cooperatives and buying clubs that pool member resources to gain purchasing power in the market."

Public Domain

Public domain textbooks can be found by simply searching for Public Domain Materials on the Web. Public domain materials are not licensed or copyrighted. You can download the classics in the public domain from Google.  You can use the table in Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States from Cornell University to determine the public domain status of a work by its date or type.

Open Textbooks

A succinct description of open textbooks along with examples is available on the Make Textbooks Affordable website.  Take a look at the Petition to support the use of open textbooks that has been signed by hundreds of faculty.

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Two major efforts to promote the development and sharing of open textbooks are Connexions and Wikibooks.

Connexions is a project at Rice University supported by the Hewlett Foundation to promote collaborative development, free sharing, and rapid publishing of scholarly content on the Web. Content is organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license.  Watch this presentation by Connexion's founder Rich Baraniuk at TED Talks titled:Goodbye, textbooks: Hello, open-source learning.

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project started in 2003 with the mission to create a free collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit.

Collections of books that are freely available include Project Gutenberg, Read Print, Bartleby, Online Books, Electronic Text Service, and the Open Book Project.

In June 2008,The Student PIRGs and MERLOT formed a strategic alliance to promote use of open textbooks with the new Open Textbooks Project.   Visitors to MERLOT can now find open textbooks using the Open Textbook category under Advanced Search > Material Type.   See open textbooks listed at MERLOT.  MERLOT members are encouraged to provide evaluation and commentary on the listed open textbooks.  For details, visit MERLOT Innovations.

Project Gutenberg has 20,000 free books in its Online Book Catalog and is the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet. The mission of Project Gutenberg is to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. In an effort to promote intercultural understanding, the World Digital Library plans to make available significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, archi­tectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials.

The Assayer displays a list of textbooks that are freely available in many disciplines. For an example, see these introductory physics textbooks and Liberte, a first-year college French textbook.

The Internet Public Library provides a comprehensive list of books that are available on the internet. A video tour of the site is available.

Free Textbook Search allows users to search for free textbooks in 113 sites in English, German, French, Dutch or Swedish.

Examples of free available eBooks from Bartleby:

Two sources of audio books in the public domain are LibriVox and Loudlit. LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain with several options for listening.

Selection of Free Audio Book Podcasts from LibriVox:

Universal Digital Library

Loudlit provides a text of great literary masterpieces as well as high quality audio to help readers improve their spelling, punctuation and paragraph structure. Loudlit literature includes children's stories, poetry, short stories, and novels.

Other sources of textbook learning materials are digital collections of institutional repositories at universities and self-archiving by authors on the internet. Some of these include:

Review of Open Textbooks

Some guidelines for review of open textbooks include:

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ISKME Tutorial: What are Open Textbooks?

Instructions: Complete the OER Commons Tutorial: What are Open Textbooks?

What are Open Textbooks?

FAQ about Open Textbooks

Frequently Asked Questions
About Open Textbooks

 

What are open textbooks?

 

Open textbooks “are textbooks that are freely available with nonrestrictive licenses. Covering a wide range of disciplines, open textbooks are available to download and print in various file formats from several web sites and OER (open educational resources) repositories. Open textbooks can range from public domain books to existing textbooks to textbooks created specifically for OER. There is a wide range of designs for open textbooks. The number of sites that provide access to them reflects the diversity of their design. Several file formats are often provided for open textbooks; typical formats are: HTML, Adobe PDF, and plain text.” (OER Commons tutorial, http://cnx.org/content/m15226/latest/)

 

What is the quality of open textbooks?

 

As with all textbooks, open textbooks vary in quality. Faculty selection of open textbooks can be guided by the recommendations of other faculty. Quality of a particular open textbook can be determined in several ways: 1) recommendations by faculty who have used the open textbook, 2) vetting by faculty reviewers, and 3) faculty use of review guidelines. 

 

Why should I adopt an open textbook?

 

Open textbooks are affordable to students which means that student education budgets can stretch further. This gives students greater flexibility in their education choices. Furthermore, faculty can readily customize open textbooks to make them better meet local teaching and learning needs. Open textbooks give educators flexibility, too. Faculty can readily customize and update open textbooks.

 

How can I find high quality open textbooks?

 

To download an open textbook, locate one from an OER repository or web site.

 

How can I develop my own open textbook?

 

“Open textbook projects rely on volunteers who are committed to a vision of providing high-quality, freely available textbooks to the worldwide community of educators and learners. Most of the projects mentioned in this module have information on their site on how you can participate in their project.” For examples, see WikiEducator at http://wikieducator.org/Free_Textbooks and Connexions at http://cnx.org. (OER Commons tutorial, http://cnx.org/content/m15226/latest/)


How can my students get a copy of the open textbook that I adopt?

 

Most open textbooks are available for viewing on a computer via the Internet or as a document that can be downloaded for off line viewing or printing by students. Faculty can provide their students with the webpage address where students can access the open textbook. Alternatively, several print-on-demand services are available via the Internet that will provide students printed copies for a minimal fee. Additionally, campus bookstores and print-shops can provide printed copies of the open textbook for sale.

 

Will my course transfer to other colleges and universities if I use an open textbook?

 

Articulation agreements between community colleges and universities generally do not include specific requirements about textbooks except to specify that the title or samples of the textbook should be included in the course outline. Check with your campus articulation officer to determine if your articulation agreements prohibit the use of open textbooks or require only publishers’ textbooks.

 

How will the adoption of open textbooks impact my campus bookstore?

 

Campus bookstores can profit from obtaining print copies of open textbooks and selling them just as they do for of publishers’ textbooks. Many campus bookstores are already engaged in efforts to lower the cost of publishers’ textbook with rental programs and other innovative strategies. 

 

What are the disadvantages to using open textbooks?

 

Some disadvantages of OER include:

  • Quality of available OER materials is inconsistent.
  • Materials may not meet Section 508 ADA accessibility requirements and must be modify to bring into compliance.
  • No common standard is yet in place for review of OER accuracy and quality.
  • Faculty need to check for accuracy of content.
  • Customization may be necessary to match departmental and/or college curriculum requirements.
  • Technical requirements to access the content vary.
Activities

Experience

  1. Identify some learning materials at Project Gutenberg.
  2. Go to Wikibooks to identify textbooks in your teaching discipline.
  3. Consider using Wikibooks for a class project; read the guidelines.
  4. Take a tour of Connexions to find out if it has resources of use to you in your teaching.
  5. Create an account at Project Gutenberg then post your own review of a textbook.

Reflect: Learning Dialogue Question

  • What are the advantages and disadvantages to using public domain textbooks for teaching?
  • What are the most useful sources of public domain textbooks in your discipline and why?

Apply

  1. Help create an eBook by volunteering for Distributed Proofreaders.
  2. Contribute to Wikibooks by editing pages, creating new pages, publicizing Wikibooks, and many other ways, such as donating.

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Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  • Locate sources of public domain textbooks.
  • Establish criteria for selection of public domain textbooks. 

Success Indicators

  1.   Lesson plan developed that incorporates use of a public domain textbook.

Readings

Recommended:

Optional:

Module 9: OER Development and Collaboration

Background

As noted by Todd Richmond at a DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center in 2006, the commons-based peer production or do-it-yourself shared media production aspect of OER may well be a catalyst for innovation once OER goes viral.

Several resources are available on the Internet that provide teachers with tools to share and collaborate on the development of OER for use in instruction. One recent and notable example is use of Wikipedia by a group of University of British Columbia students who developed a high-quality featured article about El Senor Presidente in less than 15 weeks.  To track the dynamic and iterative collaboration process, see the History of the Wikipedia article or read about the Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation course.

Other tools for OER development and collaboration include: Rice Connexions, Open Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS), WikiEducator, WikiBooks, and Citizendium.

Rice Connexions

Take a tour of Connexions. Connexions was started at Rice University in 1999 to promote innovative ways to write, edit, publish, and use textbooks and other learning materials. Connexion participants are encouraged to:

  • Create educational materials and contribute them to the repository
  • Rip or copy the material and customize it
  • Mix the material together into new books and courses
  • Burn or create finished products such as e-learning web courses, CDroms, and even printed books

For a video presentation June 18, 2007 (55 minutes) by Sidney Burrus about the premise of Connexions, connecting ideas and people, Rip-Mix-Burn, see YouTube.  Open-access software tools and free-use materials are available via the Creative Commons Attribution license to facilitate collaboration and sharing. At Connexions, instructors can easily collaborate on OER development in a variety of roles including coauthors, maintainers, workgroup members, suggesters, and users of derived copies. Instructors can update their OER course material and make it available for distribution quickly.   If you want more details about Connexions, read "Challenges and Opportunities for the Open Education Movement: A Connexions Case Study" by Richard G. Baraniuk.

Wikieducator

Wikieducator promotes collaborative authoring and use of OER by providing tools using wiki technologies such as eXe. The Wikieducator Content Development Project is an opportunity for educators to contribute and share their OER.  Watch a short video about how to create an account at Wikieducator. Register for your account.

OpenLearn

OpenLearn was launched in October 2006 as part of the Open University. The site publishes cohesive learning objects taken from Open University courses under a Creative Commons license. This means that users can download and reuse the materials, amending them to suit their purpose and context. This is the United Kingdom’s only university dedicated to distance learning.  In 2007, the Open University was awarded a grant by the Hewlett Foundation to support its work to make course materials freely available to anyone in the world via the OpenLearn website.

Curriki

Curriki is is a global education and learning community that offers opportunities for educators to contribute, share, and collaborate on the development of learning materials.

OWL Institute

In addition to providing users with connections to OER resources and communities, the OWL Institute Portal to provides the opportunity for users to develop and share their own OER resources. Contact the Owl Institute to receive "creator" or "teacher" access to courses and pages.

Digital Universe

The Digital Universe seeks stewards and voluntary consultants to assist in their efforts "to organize the sum total of human knowledge and make it available to everyone."

Le Mill

Tour Le Mill to find a variety of open learning materials. Join the Learning Mill community to contribute and share your own learning materials. FAQs describe how to use the site.

Wikibooks

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project that started in 2003 with the goal to create a free collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. Since its inception, volunteers have written over 25,000 modules in a multitude of textbooks. If you're an instructor planning on using Wikibooks for a class project, read guidelines for class projects.

Citizendium - Eduzendium

Recently, Larry Sanger, former editor of Wikipedia, has launched a new project called Citizendium which is intended to create "the world's most trusted encyclopedia and knowledge base."   This effort seeks to avoid some of the criticisms of Wikipedia as lacking credibility as a source of open knowledge.  Eduzendium is "a program in which the Citizendium partners with university programs throughout the world to create high-quality, English language entries for the Citizendium" and provide academic credit for contributions.

More Tools

OLCOS, the UK's Open Learning Content Observatory Services project contains a 30 minute tutorial about how to produce OER. This tutorial provides information and practical tasks in creating and modifying open content in open process as well as formats that can be published as open educational resources and tools that support this process.

Take a tour of the Instructional Architect, a service of the National Science Digital Library, to find out how you can use it to find discipline-specific OER, organize and modify those resources into activities for your students, and make those new activities available to a variety of audiences.

ccMixter is a community music site provide opportunities to collaborate with others to re-purpose and mix existing learning materials licensed under Creative Commons.

Send2Wiki is a new tool that lets users easily send a copy of a webpage to a wiki for remixing. Wikia provides free wiki hosting designed expressly for promoting reuse of open content with the MediaWiki software. All content on Wikia is perpetually licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Watch Scott Leslie's 10 video about OpenEd Demonstrator – Augmenting OER with Client-Side Tools

Qedoc is an interactive learning resource which focus on quiz-making and quiz-taking. Qedoc learning modules are self-contained modifiable pieces of learning software which you can download to play with, learn from, modify and upload again.  This tool warns developers to avoid what they term context locking in which OER are developed in such a way as to be relatively useless for anyone other than the developer.

Other suggestions for developing open educational resources are available at Wikiversity.

Online Course

If you want more instruction on OER development, consider enrolling in a Wikiversity online course about Composing Free and Open Online Educational Resources that started March 3, 2008. This course is also available as a blog at http://oercourse.wordpress.com/.  Several participants have posted their assignments to blogs that can be viewed by the public. 

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OLCOS OER Produce and Remix Tutorial

Instructions: For more information on and practical tasks in creating and modifying open content in an open process, see this OLCOS tutorial.

OLCOS OER Produce and Remix Tutorial

Submitting to OER Commons Tutorial

Instructions: If you want assistance with using OER Commons, take a look at this tutorial that covers how to submit your own content items or links to items about the field of open education to OER Commons.

Submitting to OER Commons Tutorial

Tools for Creating Open Content

Instructions: For more information about tools and standards for producing open educational content, see this list of tools provided by OLCOS.

Tools for Creating Open Content

Submitting to WikiMedia Commons

Instructions: Use this tutorial if you want to find out how to submit any media to WikiMedia Commons.

Submitting to WikiMedia Commons

Activities

Experience (select at least two)

  1. Create a set of interview questions about the use and/or development of OER. Interview at least three people with substantial experience in the use and/or development of OER. Use Creative Commons to search for learning materials that you are free to use, remix, repurpose, etc.
  2. OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation is carrying out a study on Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education.  If you are willing, you can take part in the OECD Survey.
  3. Join OER Commons. Go to the OER Commons website, then click on Join Now.
    1. Click on Start My OER Portfolio.
    2. Visit Shared Portfolios posted to the OER Commons website to see to see how others search, use, and interact with OER.
  4. Join Curriki then use Currikulum Builder to create a learning resource or consider becoming a volunteer.

Reflect: Learning Dialogue Question

  • What is the best way to promote development of OER among educators?
  • Open educational resources (OERs) offer free access to high quality learning materials for all. But online access and offline distribution can be costly. In addition, there is often a need for language translation and local adaptation to fully leverage the value of OERs.
  • How are you using OERs, what impact are they having, & what are the biggest challenges & opportunities associated with wider distribution, access and use?

Apply

Wikibooks

  1. Create an account at Wikibooks.
  2. Go to Wikibooks Sandbox to create a wiki.

Connexions

  1. Create a module to share at Connexions.
  2. After registering, review the New Author Guide.
  3. You can import a Word document or use the Connexions Edit-in-Place tool to create your module.

Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  1. Use tools and resources to develop OER.
  2. Identify the requirements for OER in order to comply with ADA Section 508 requirements. 

Success Indicators

  1. OER developed by the learner added to learner's own online collection or portfolio.

Reading and Resources

Readings

Supplemental Resources

Module 10: OER Delivery, Storage, and Organization

Introduction

Several resources are available on the Internet that provide teachers with tools to organize, deliver, and share OER for use in instruction. Some of these are: MERLOT, Connexions, and WikiEducator. Instructors can deliver OER to students in either digital or print formats. 

Another consideration in delivery of OER is the need to localize the content.  Localization is the process of adapting content for appropriateness to a specific region or language by adding locale-specific components and/or translating text.

OLCOS

The UK's Open Learning Content Observatory Services project contains 30 minute tutorial about how to publish and share OER.

OER Commons

OER Commons allows members to share portfolios. Your personalized portfolio allows you quick access to your previous use of the OER Commons. As you engage with OER content by submitting ratings and reviews, your portfolio is created automatically. If desired, you can share your portfolio with others and allow others to build on what you know. Also, you can view others’ portfolios to see how people are finding, using, and interacting with OER.

MERLOT

Read about MERLOT's Personal Collections. Build and display your portfolio, as it evolves for the duration of your students' course participation, using the From the Author Snapshots.  MERLOT recently added Open Textbooks to its "materials type" so that viewers can catalog submitted materials as open textbook.   Try looking for an open textbook at MERLOT - click on advanced search right under the "search box" in the top right hand corner of the page http://www.merlot.org/merlot/advSearchMaterials.htm, you be able to select "Open Textbook" from the list of "Material Types".  After highlighting "Open Textbook", click on the search button and you'll find over two dozen materials.MERLOT is now ready for anyone to easily and quickly add their open textbooks to the MERLOT collection.  

WikiEducator

WikiEducator provides a Content Development Project as an opportunity for instructors to contribute and share their OER.

Connexions

As of January 2006, there were over 3,200 modules and over 150 courses in Connexions. Volunteers are translating modules and courses into a wide variety of different languages, including Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, and Thai (source OECD). Funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Connexions is part of a broader effort to use the internet for innovative delivery of educational materials. At Connexions, instructors can set up a collection of learning materials.  A course/collection contains several Connexions modules that you group together in a specific order. These modules will appear as chapters in a single document to Connexions visitors who view your course/collection. Rice University's Connexions provides on-demand printing with QOOP Inc. that will allow students and instructors to order high-quality, hardbound textbooks from Connexions via the internet for affordable prices. 

In the Connexions Community College Initiative, the top 10 community college courses, including English composition, college algebra, introduction to psychology, general chemistry, are being developed. These courses will be available for free in Connexions and in a low-cost printed form. Under this model, readers can access all books online for free, and they will pay only if they want a printed book, which they'll order online and for home delivery. Connexions also plans to develop a catalog of the 10 most-popular community college textbooks, which also will be free for online viewing and cost less than $30 when purchased as hardbound books. Connexions plans to offer more than 100 titles for online purchase by year's end. You can preview a Collaborative Statistics textbook that is being developed this summer.

Delivery of Course Materials

OER developers can distribute their learning materials via the internet using the tools and resources provided for free to educators at WordCircle, NiceNet, Netcipia, Edu2.0, WetPaint, Edublogs, or Epsilen.  Le Mill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources.  Works posted to Le Mill are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Publishing Learning Materials

QOOP's print-on-demand service will allow Connexions users to order customized course guides and a variety of fully developed Connexions textbooks. Standard paperbacks will take just 3-5 days to produce and ship, and traditional hardbacks will take about a week to produce. QOOP ships directly to customers.

Lulu lets you publish and sell and print on demand books, e-books, online music, images, and custom calendars.  Take a tour of Lulu to find out how to publish using their services. Lulu makes 20% of total cost of the textbook you publish using their services. Educause provides a convenient summary of Lulu services in 7 Things You Should Know about Lulu.


SafariU allows faculty to create, publish and share customized computer science and information technology course materials. SafariU was developed by O'Reilly Media in conjunction with substantial feedback from educators and trainers. SafariU allows members to select chapters or sections from O'Reilly books and articles to include in custom print books and online learning resources that students can access directly. Other print-on-demand services include Illumina and exlibris.

The eXe project is developing a freely available Open Source authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup. eXe can export content as self-contained web pages or as SCORM 1.2 or IMS Content Packages. Confused? View a video explanation.

Arranged in alphabetical order, the 80 OER Tools for Publishing and Development Initiatives list includes 80 online resources that you can use to learn how to build or participate in a collaborative educational effort that focuses on publication and development of those materials.

Print on Demand is an experimental site designed to archive and publish public domain materials from sites including Internet Archive and Google Books. 

Another way to put OER into a format suitable for do-it-yourself printing is to use PDF export of a WikiEducator Collection that you have created.  Read this WikiEducator blog for tips.

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OLCOS Share OER Tutorial

Instructions: See this OLCOS tutorial for more information and practical tasks in publishing and sharing open educational resources, and facilitating the sharing of this new content by using suitable formats.

OLCOS Share OER Tutorial

Tagging and Rating in OER Commons

Instructions: Complete the tutorial about Tagging and Rating in OER Commons.

Tutorial about Tagging and Rating in OER Commons

ISKME Tutorial: What is Localization?

Instructions: Complete the ISKME Tutorial: What is Localization?

What is Localization

Activities

Experience

1.   Experience OER Commons

  1. If you haven't already done so, join OER Commons. Go to the OER Commons website, then click on Join Now.
  2. Click on Start My OER Portfolio.
  3. Visit Shared Portfolios posted to the OER Commons website to see to see how others search, use, and interact with OER.

2.  MERLOT

  1. View the Gallery of Sample MERLOT From the Author Snapshots then find out how to create your own Author Snapshot using the KEEP Toolkit.
  2. Go to the MERLOT website.

Connexions

  1. Create a Course/Collection at the Connexions website.

Reflect: Learning Dialogue Question

  1. What is the best way for you to disseminate OER to your students?
  2. Do you want to share your OER for public use and repurposing? Why or why not?
  3. What are some of the print-on-demand services for disseminating OER?
  4. What tools and features are available to deliver OER?

Apply

  1. Create a module to share at Connexions.
  2. Determine the cost to your students to purchase OER for your course using Lulu.

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Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  1. Course participants will use various tools as well as peer collaboration to build a Public Domain Materials Portfolio of discipline-specific public domain materials suitable for use in their own teaching.
  2. Determine cost-effective printing options for students.

Success Indicators

  1. OER added to learner's own online collection or portfolio.
  2. OER review posted by the learner.

Readings

Supplemental Resources

Module 11: Support for OER Use on Campus

In order to promote use of OER across campus, the challenges must be identified and addressed. Results of a two-year study are presented in the article "Why Study Users: An Environmental Scan of Use and Users of Digital Resources in the Humanities and Social Sciences Undergraduate Education.” Based on this study, barriers to use of digital resources include the lack of direct relevance to their preferred pedagogical approaches, and insufficient time and classroom resources.

See article by Leigh Blackall in WikiEducator: Open educational resources and practices.

Challenges

  • Resources for faculty support
  • Quality assurance of learning materials
  • Limited availability of fully vetted and comprehensive learning materials in some disciplines
  • Articulation and transfer issues
  • Printing and computer lab demands on campus by students
  • Identification of collaborative tools for development, use, and delivery of OER learning materials
  • Fostering use of the tools by faculty
  • Compliance with federal and state accessibility requirements

Resources needed to support faculty use and development of OER:

  • Training
  • Technical assistance
  • Software
  • Hardware
  • Release time

Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. provides a concise explanation of OER development models, sustainability, quality and accreditation.

Teaching without a Textbook: Strategies to Focus Learning on Fundamental Concepts and Scientific Process by M. W. Klymkowsky:

"Clearly, the issue of whether to use a textbook is complex, and it is dependent upon course and curricular goals. Students (and colleagues) expect a textbook; yet often, the textbook is not used, except as a reference. Most textbooks are not written with current evidence about best teaching and learning practices in mind, so they may be difficult to integrate into the design and presentation of a course that is based on this evidence. Because many instructors provide detailed online or downloadable notes, it would be a worthwhile exercise to consider whether a textbook is required, or whether other materials could serve its purpose. In the end, the result may be a more thoughtful approach to what is taught, how it is taught, and how student mastery is assessed."

Use of open content or learning materials on a college campus represents a daunting paradigm shift for both faculty and the institution.  In their article Open Educational Resources: Toward a New Educational Paradigm, Petrides and Jimes analyze the on-going challenges of OER use and re-use in terms of contextualization issues, hierarchy, and community. 

Orchestrating such a shift requires a coordinated and system-wide effort that marshals the expertise, resources, and skills from a broad spectrum of the campus community.  For more information, see Willie Pritchard's OER presentation to College of the Canyons.

Step One: Needs Assessment

In order to promote use of Open Educational Resources across campus, the unique challenges on campus must be identified and addressed.

Conduct a needs assessment of stakeholders to determine knowledge of, interest in, and use of OER on campus Campus stakeholders might include:

  • Faculty opinion leaders
  • Librarians
  • Bookstore manager
  • Campus printshop manager
  • Academic senate
  • Department Chairs
  • Faculty association
  • Academic deans
  • Curriculum committee
  • Faculty trainers
  • Tech support staff
  • Administrators
  • Boards of Trustees

A needs assessment can be conducted in a number of ways:

Step Two: Identify and Prioritize Challenges

Based on your campus needs assessment, identify and prioritize specific challenges.

Possible challenges:

  • Resources for faculty support
  • Quality assurance of learning materials
  • Limited availability of fully vetted and comprehensive learning materials in some disciplines
  • Articulation and transfer issues
  • Printing and computer lab demands on campus by students
  • Identification of collaborative tools for development, use, and delivery of OER learning materials
  • Fostering use of the tools by faculty
  • Compliance with federal and state accessibility requirements

Step Three: Overcome Challenges

Recruit a Taskforce to develop specific strategies and an implementation timeline to overcome the top challenges. Use Marketing Materials for Campus Presentations to recruit Taskforce volunteers and encourage participation in the campus OER initiative.

Consider distributing a free OER Introduction Booklet recently released by the dgCommunity of Development Gateway Foundation.  They are also providing a series of free Webinars. The Booklet and the Webinar both provide:- a definition of Open Educational Resources,- an introduction to Open licenses and Standards,- an introduction to the Production and Distribution of OER,- a list of OER content repositories, search engines and projects.

Possible Strategies:

  • Host Showcases or Case Studies (in person and online) in which faculty can demonstrate their effective uses of OER
  • Provide OER identification, organization, and development tools that are easy to use
  • Offer training in OER development and use (see Introduction to OER tutorial)
  • Establish OER “mentors” such as faculty within academic divisions or librarians
  • Mainstream the process for ordering "class packets” of OER to be consistent with the textbook adoption process
  • Provide faculty withdiscipline-specific OER that have already been vetted for quality and appropriateness for specific courses
  • Set up website for faculty to dialogue and share (e.g., PBwiki, Edublogs, Blogger, WordPress, CollectiveX, WordCircle, Epsilen, Digication, Netcipia)

Step Four:  Sustainability 

In order to maintain use of OER on campus, engage faculty and staff in collaborative and mutually beneficial efforts to identify and produce OER.  For an example of such an effort, see the Plagiarism Module Project in which faculty are invited to contribute and share content to build a tutorial about plagiarism that will be made freely available to the public under a Creative Commons license.

OER Development Projects and Tools

Projects that support the development of open educational resources include:

List of Institutional OER Policies

Instructions: See this OLCOS list of exemplary institutional OER policies.

List of Institutional OER Policies

ISKME Tutorial: Students and OER

Instructions: Complete the ISKME Tutorial: Students and OER.

Students and OER

Activities

Experience

  1. Create a detailed plan to implement OER on your campus. Include a marketing plan, timeline, objectives, resources, tasks, and sources of support.

Reflect: Learning Dialogue Question

  • What would be the most challenging barriers to promoting OER use on your college campus?  Why?  How can those barriers be overcome? 

Apply

  1. Implement OER on your campus.

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Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  1.   Identify the tasks necessary to promoting OER use on campus.

Success Indicators

  1.   OER are used at the learner's campus.

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Readings and Resources

Readings

Recommended:

Optional:

Module 12: Future of OER Movement

Sustainability

As stated by Stephen Downes, a senior researcher with the National Research Council of Canada, "What constitutes sustainable is unlikely to be reducible to a single metric or calculation; it will ultimately depend on the economies and the objectives of the provider. This may well explain why, as we shall see, there are many models for sustainable OERs. This indeterminacy, though it may raise difficulties for economists, may nonetheless be a good thing. It may allow many organizations in many ways to see OERs as sustainable even in cases where a broad social consensus does not exist" (http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=33401).  Stephen Downes explains how to make OER sustainable in his 2006 article, Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources, and this slideshow: Open Educational Resources And The Personal Learning Environment.

A good grasp of the sustainability of OERs requires more than just knowing the various funding models, technical models or content models.  Sustainability also involves volunteers and incentives, community and partnerships, co-production and sharing, distributed management and control.

Legislation

President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.

The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

A number of states are considering legislation in support of OER as well.  For example, legislators in California and Washington have introduced proposals to encourage open educational resources, including AB 2261 by California Assembly member Ira Ruskin.

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources

"The Foothill-De Anza Community College District in Silicon Valley, California is providing state and national leadership as the result of its public domain policy on the creation and use of open educational resources. The policy encourages faculty to develop and use public domain and open content materials for their classes to provide affordable, high-quality alternatives to traditional textbooks. Foothill-De Anza is also providing training for its faculty to better use OER tools and materials, and is supporting the new Community College OER Consortium." (from Turn the Page Making College Textbooks More Affordable, 2007, p. 22). 
 

Take a look at how the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources is exploring ways to sustain OER efforts.  The CCCOER website contains many resources for educators interested in OER.  As members of the CCCOER, faculty will start reviewing open-textbook models for quality, usability, accessibility, and sustainability.  The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College in 2007.  It is currently managing the Community College Open Textbook project, funded by a $530,000 grant to the Foothill-De Anza Community College District from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Content Models

For a comparison of two content models, see this article in WikiEducator: Producer-consumer and Co-Production Models 

Producer-consumer models are those in which an institution or consortium develop materials and release courseware under an open license that allows the content to be reused by other providers.  Such models are more likely to be managed centrally and to involve professional staff and, therefore, greater control over quality and content.  Examples include MIT's OpenCourseware or the British Open University's Open Learn, Wikipedia and Wikiversity as well as Larry Sanger's blog about developing open textbooks with appeals to philanthropists.  To support Sanger's effort, you can sign a Petition. 

According to the WikiEducator article:  "Co-production models are those which encourage open and unrestricted participation aimed to leverage the benefits of mass-collaboration and the principles of self organization. They may involve numerous partnerships, and may involve volunteer contributors."  While there is little control over quality and content in co-production models, they require much less funding.  

Recently, several websites have become available that provide tools to support the identification, development, use, re-use, collaboration, and delivery of open learning content including searching and organization of content.  Some websites, such as: OER Commons, Open Content, WikiEducator, Connexions, OWL Institute, and OERderves, are devoted to nurturing online learning communities, wikis, and blogs on various aspects of OER.   

For more information and examples of co-production models, see:

Funding Models

Flat World Knowledge and MITE utilize two cost-shifting models.  Flat World Knowledge offers a proprietary solution supports open textbooks by selling textbook by-products.  This approach is similar to what is described in Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine.

The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education utilizes a cost-shifting model in which institutions are charged for content and support materials rather than students or faculty.  Other funding models are described in Money Makes the World Go… Open?

Research


In order to ensure a dynamic future for OER, much research needs to be done on OER.  A report on a research agenda is available from UNESCO that poses questions about: 

  • Economic analyses
  • Creation of OERs... tools, collaboration, best practices
  • Quality assurance
  • Finding OERs... research on tagging, metadata, search
  • Use of OERs... research on effective use of OERs
  • Localization
  • Scenarios research
  • Policy Interventions

Future of OER


To keep up with the ever-changing landscape of OER, consider attending conferences and subscribing to OER blog newsfeeds.

Also, a new professional journal is poised to launch this year that promises to keep us abreast of OER development: Eduforge: The International Journal of Open Education Resources.

Resources about OER Sustainability

Activities

Experience

Create a visual representation or Mind Map of your current understanding of OER.

Reflect: Learning Dialogue Question

  1. How can you build a sustainable business model around giving away educational materials?  Should governments fund open educational resource projects?
  2. Why does OER matter, how does it work, and what are the possibilities for the future of use and re-use of open education content?

Apply

  1. Volunteer to help with OER projects at WikiBooks, Wikiversity, Community College Consortium for OER, Edu2.0, etc.

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Skills/Objectives

Learners will be able to:

  1.   Identify the challenges of sustainability for OER projects.

Success Indicators

  1.   Active membership in an OER movement organization by the learner.

Readings and Resources

Readings

Recommended:

Optional:

Supplemental Resources

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