Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 21, 2023

At some point over the last decade, open educational resources (OER) advocacy in US higher education became zero textbook costs (ZTC) advocacy. But OER / ZTC advocates have had a fundamental problem simmering for many years now, and the recent advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 will quickly bring that simmer to a boil.

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OER Advocacy Outcomes Instructional Materials 108

Hapara

JUNE 16, 2022

Open educational resources, also known as OER, provide a great way to supplement curriculum to differentiate instruction and better meet each learner’s needs in your classroom. This scenario is pretty common for educators, but remains an obstacle when equally distributing resources. So what does that mean?

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Differentiated Instruction OER Resources Hapara 144

Doug Levin

MARCH 5, 2018

In a post of nearly two years ago (“ OERwashing: Beyond the Elephant Test “), I argued that the OER community lacked a reliable way to assess new entrants to the OER field, especially for-profit organizations, in terms of their support for openness and OER community values. Petrides, L., and Watson, C.E.

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OER Industry Assessment Libraries 186

Doug Levin

MAY 12, 2015

and I am merely a fan – not a fanboy – of open educational resources (OER).** Others surely see me as some sort of OER fanatic. So, if these are the actions of someone who is an OER fan, what stops me short of claiming fanboy status? I work in K-12 education in the U.S., I beg to disagree. Image credits.

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OER Instructional Materials Khan Academy Outcomes 297

The Journal

MARCH 6, 2019

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

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OER Examples Resources Education 150

eSchool News

DECEMBER 23, 2022

That’s why I’ve turned to open educational resources (OER). OER are openly licensed, which means that educators can use, customize, and share these resources for free, allowing them to incorporate material that’s fresh and relevant for their students—all without having to worry about traditional copyright restrictions.

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OER Classroom LMS Instructional Materials 118

Doug Levin

APRIL 30, 2018

Indeed, the often unspoken relationship between OER and educational technology can be fraught with misplaced assumptions, red flags, value conflicts, and licensing complications. You can read some of the highlights of this work in my interview (“ How can technology advance open educational resources? That the U.S.

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OER Technology Education Software 150

The CoolCatTeacher

SEPTEMBER 22, 2015

Want free resources? Open education resources (OERs) can help busy teachers everywhere! Today’s guest, Sue Jones, has created a helpful guide to OERs and is using them in her highered classroom. How OER resources can save teachers lots of time. Why teachers are so excited about OER resources.

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OER Resources Tools How To 150

Edsurge

AUGUST 4, 2022

In May, the homework-help site that relies on student-generated content, Course Hero, dipped its toes into freely available, openly licensed alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, course materials. This was the company’s “first foray” into OER, and it is still figuring out how the OER fits, Morris says. “I

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OER Resources Education Course 143

Teacher Tech

MAY 7, 2019

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

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OER Edcamps Resources Education 111

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

There’s great news out of the recent UNESCO meeting in Paris, where member states unanimously adopted the draft Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). This dramatically simplifies understanding what is and isn’t OER. Resources in the public domain or released under an open license are OER.

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OER Advocacy Resources Accessibility 119

Edsurge

OCTOBER 11, 2018

Regardless of where you stand on the debate over open educational resources, you’re probably wondering: Does OER actually improve learning outcomes? At least, that was one of the main takeaways from a short session led by Phillip Grimaldi, director of research at OpenStax, a nonprofit OER initiative out of Rice University.

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OER Learning Outcomes Comparison 126

Edsurge

JUNE 18, 2020

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

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Course OER Resources Education 190

The Journal

JULY 11, 2017

Finally, OER is coming of age!

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OER Course Resources Education 303

The Journal

JUNE 20, 2016

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

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OER Blended Learning Resources Learning 225

Doug Levin

FEBRUARY 21, 2016

K-12 education system by open educational resources (OER) since 2009, although my first exposure to the ideas and leaders of the movement stretch back to the launch of the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. This is where context matters most for the OER movement. Even within the U.S.

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OER Instructional Materials Advocacy Meeting 170

Edsurge

JUNE 16, 2020

Lumen Learning, a company that sells low-cost OER textbooks and courseware, plans to start offering professional development services for faculty that can be bundled with its titles. In other words, some of its textbooks are now sold with coaching on how to teach with OER more effectively.

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OER Company Learning Course 116

Edsurge

MARCH 3, 2020

Open educational resources have gone global and may help make learning more accessible, equitable and inclusive around the world. OER was one of six “emerging technologies and practices” the panelists highlighted as most likely to significantly influence postsecondary teaching and learning in the future. “It In the U.S.,

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OER Resources Education Report 192

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 9, 2020

In this first bite-sized installment I’m going to address the major flaw in the OER definition provided as part of the recent UNESCO OER Recommendation. Accessing an educational resource. The definition in the recommendation as set forth in Section I. Definition and Scope reads: 1. Eating a piece of cake. Driving a car.

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OER Libraries Accessibility Exercises 107

Iterating Toward Openness

DECEMBER 2, 2019

I recently wrote a brief essay about the wonderful new UNESCO OER Recommendation. For those of you who don’t want to read the full analysis below, here’s the key takeaway: Imagine what would happen if making copies of OER was illegal. Under the definition of OER now adopted unanimously by UNESCO member states, it can be.

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OER Accessibility Examples Resources 106

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

At OpenEd18 I gave a presentation titled “Questioning the OER Orthodoxy: Is the Commons the Right Metaphor for our Work?” After this brief discussion, I asked “what if the commons is the wrong metaphor for our work with OER?” During the presentation, I shared the following contrasts between a commons and OER.

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OER Resources Accessibility Examples 110

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 7, 2018

tl ;dr – If a resource is licensed in a way that grants you permission to engage in the 5R activities, and grants you those permissions for free, it’s an open educational resource (OER) – no matter where you find it or how it’s being used. I have an obsession with definitions.

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OER LMS Laptops Accessibility 83

Edsurge

JANUARY 15, 2019

Open educational resources hit a turning point in 2018. For the first time ever, the federal government put forward funds to support initiatives around open educational resources, and recent studies show that faculty attitudes towards using and adapting these openly-licensed learning materials are steadily improving.

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OER Course Resources Libraries 135

Edsurge

JANUARY 4, 2018

But who makes the pitch for free or low-cost alternatives to textbooks known as OER, or open educational resources? One project she led this year involved creating a series of videos promoting “Textbook Heroes,”professors who have replaced commercial textbooks in their courses with OER. And it kind of hinders everything.”

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OER Libraries lynda.com E-rate 163

Digital Promise

JUNE 8, 2017

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

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OER Resources Classroom Education 227

Iterating Toward Openness

OCTOBER 9, 2018

Recently I’ve been doing both more thinking and more roll-up-your-sleeves working on continuous improvement of OER. And this process of making OER more effective every semester – also known as “continuous improvement” – is where we see some of the most exciting opportunities to collaborate with faculty.

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OER Outcomes Analysis Assessment 114

The Journal

AUGUST 22, 2016

Gooru.org is an OER marketplace with 5,000,000+ open education resources. But, most excitingly, they are posting "just" 35 full courses that teachers can "copy and customize." We applaud gooru.org for taking this major step in providing support for teachers who are trying to #GoOpen!

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OER Course Resources Education 150

Iterating Toward Openness

AUGUST 27, 2019

UNESCO later decided to refer to open content intended to support research, teaching, and learning as “open educational resources.” Materials that were openly licensed and free were the OER we had spent the last decade advocating for. Other schools have OER policies and OER degree programs. green below).

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OER Advocacy Policies Libraries 112

eSchool News

OCTOBER 18, 2023

. — Today, SETDA is pleased to announce the release of a cybersecurity resource focused on small, rural, and under-resourced districts. It is the newest addition to SETDA’s Cybersecurity & Privacy Collection , available for access in their OER Commons site. “As

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Resources Microsoft Advocacy OER 92

Edsurge

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

There’s new evidence that open educational resources may contribute to helping students complete college. The findings come out of the Achieving the Dream OER Degree Initiative , which provided grant money to 38 community colleges across 13 states to create degree pathways of courses that use OER materials instead of commercial textbooks.

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OER Resources Course Education 165

Edsurge

OCTOBER 30, 2018

The number of colleges running efforts to help professors shift from published textbooks to low-cost online materials known as OER is growing rapidly. This is no longer an intellectual argument on the part of the [OER] evangelists.” As Green put it: “There’s a huge set of concerns about quality of OER by faculty.”

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OER Survey Data Course 125

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 15, 2018

In the link in that quote, Stephen writes “The ‘conversion’ of an open educational resource is a modification of the resource, or conditions related to the resource, such that it is in some way transformed from being an open educational resource to something that is not an open educational resource.”

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OER Accessibility Resources Examples 64

Edsurge

OCTOBER 24, 2018

One popular draw to open educational resources is that these openly-licensed learning materials can—and are often encouraged to—be tailored for a particular professor or course. Communications librarian Kristen Hoffman oversees much of the OER work at Seattle Pacific University, a Christian university in Washington.

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OER Libraries Course Study 111

Iterating Toward Openness

DECEMBER 20, 2018

At the OpenEd Conference in 2013, Nicole Allen and I challenged the OER community to save students one billion dollars. The overall average price for “OER Only” (Open Educational Resources in all formats, including new print, used print, rental, loose-leaf, and digital) is $10.69. The adoption rate of OER is 6.3%.

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OER Data Analysis Secondary 114

NeverEndingSearch

MAY 6, 2019

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

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OER Future Ready Case Study Outcomes 80

Edsurge

DECEMBER 28, 2017

Open educational resources (OER) have long been touted as “the next big thing” in higher education, but the drawn-out hype has led many educators and administrators to wonder if it would ever live up to its expectations. Those days are over: 2017 was OER’s breakthrough year. That happened in 2017.

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OER Tools Industry LMS 136

Shake Up Learning

MARCH 8, 2022

The post The FREE Lesson Plans and Resources You Aren’t Using! Rich shares the power of Open Educational Resources (OER)–what they are, where to find them, and how to get started. Rich shares the power of Open Educational Resources (OER)–what they are, where to find them, and how to get started.

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OER Resources Common Core Digital Badges 93