What are OERs?
The name “OER” has many sub-definitions. They can be
textbooks, articles, lectures, whole courses, or other materials that
are free and available online for anyone to use. A reoccurring
theme that has been used to describe these resources has been the
“4 Rs”. These are “Reuse”, “Revise”, “Remix”, and “Redistribute”.
The information in OER is provided freely, and users can
download and keep it for as long as they would like. Users can
edit the content while also adding new content to the existing
OER. Users are also allowed to share the original OER and their
own versions with students and/or the whole worldwide web.
Open Course Ware is one sub-division of OER. They are almost
synonymous, but it is good to know the difference between the
two. Open Course Ware is usually a university publishing
materials that are used in their classrooms. Along with content
material used in classrooms, there are usually other materials
supplied, like syllabi, assignments, or quizzes. They are basically
more structured OER.
Who is using OER? Are they being used?
According to research done on the matter, 50% of institutions in
the U.S. are using OER in at least one class.
-Unfortunately, this could be misleading, as a teacher could
assign one OER article and be counted as using OER.
Much of the outreach with OER has been with community
colleges, especially, it seems, in California.
Last year, the state of Washington opened their new Open Course
Library that contained textbooks, syllabi, readings, activities and
assessments for 42 community college courses.
University of Massachusetts has spent $10,000 in the past year on
developing courses that do not use traditional textbooks, but use
OER, instead.
Some common features and problems…
Many OERs are their own textbooks, so, unfortunately, learners
usually cannot search for textbooks that match the textbooks that
are assigned to them by teachers, for example.
-This would be fixed by teachers adopting the textbooks
that are on these sites and teaching out of them.
Most of the sites researched below have articles that have been
reviewed, but sometimes the fact that anyone can make their own
resource makes it hard to know which OERs are legitimate.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/news/2012/02/07/11114/openeducational-resources/
www.lumenlearning.com/oer
Lecture by Dr. Cable Green
There is an overwhelming demand for education that will
force online education to be the only option for some.
-Would take 4 new universities around the world with
30,000 students learning from each, open every week for
next 15 years to meet the current need for education.
-We will have to think about giving out certificates and
degrees in different ways.
-California currently has 470,000 students who cannot get
into the classes they want and need (gen ed courses).
10 years ago we had the technology, but not the legal tools,
to share information.
-We had the public domain on one end.
-It takes the authors death and seventy more years
before a work is in the public domain.
-We had copyright on the other end.
Lawyers got together and said that we needed open licenses
that are free, so that people can share legally while still
maintaining their copyright.
-This is the idea of Creative Commons.
-Only the person who owns the material can put a creative
commons license on it.
People wanted choices in their licensing. They figured that
they might want to reserve some of their rights. So there are 6
different options for licensing.
-All options require attribution. Credit always needs to go
to the owner of the work.
-Share Alike: if you modify the owner’s work, you have to
license the work under the same terms that the owner had
licensed the work under.
-Ex: Wikipedia uses Creative Commons Attribution
Share Alike. “I understand that my stuff is going to go
forward forever and that others can use and modify it.”
-You can use and modify and redistribute the work, but you
cannot sell it.
-“You may take Creative Common’s non-commercial works,
like MIT’s entire curriculum … just put all of their courses
online … All of that’s available.” (Since you would not be
selling the content.
-The No Derivatives Option says that people can use the
owner’s work, but it cannot be changed.
-Does not work so well in education because educators
need to change things to fit their classes.
-They created CC0, a way for people to put things directly
into the public domain. You can do this while giving up your
copyrights or keeping them, either way.
-Popular in science data, where attribution is near
impossible to assign.
Creative Commons licensing has machine-readable code
within all of the works, received when the maker of the work gets
the license. This helps people to find the open resources and find
out who gets attribution.
Creative Commons has teams in 70 nations.
-Everybody wants to share.
The White House recently passed legislature that says that
if publicly funded money is given out for research grants, the
result is required to be freely available after 12 months.
-Creative commons pointed out that “open” is better than
“freely available.
-There is so much information out there that it is impossible
to read every article in your field. Computer Scientists are
making technology that can, by word recognition, “read” all
of that information and report back about it.
-This is only possible with an open license; otherwise,
you are violating copyright.
Schools have been realizing that they are at a disadvantage
if they do not share their content.
-If content has an open license, there are more people who
can review it, tweak it, translate it, and make it better.
The United States is on track to spend 8.6 billion dollars
buying content for Common Core classes (there are about 24
courses) for k-12. It would cost quite a lot less to just pay teachers
to make the courses and put them under an open license.
-Again, this is all public money being used to buy content
that is not being shared with the public.
Recently, Creative Commons worked with Washington
State to make their general education curriculum. People in Brazil
took all of this, translated it into Spanish and Portuguese, fixed
any errors they found in the content, and added their own
culturally relevant examples. In turn, Brazil agreed to share
everything that they fixed and changed right back to Washington
State. Washington State got this 2.0 version of their curriculum
back with zero charge to them.
The problem with the policy makers is that they have a
problem with the individual components of this plan and also how
all of this will fit together. They do not understand how these
things would work to make OERs a better option for classes. This
may just be because it has never been laid out for them. Cable
Green says that it is public servants’ fiscal responsibility to make
sure that policy makers do get it and that public funds are used
wisely.
He compares how much this new kind of thinking has
affected the music/television world to the academic world.
-It is possible to get access to almost all movies and
television for around $8 a month.
-It is possible to get access to almost all music for around
$10 a month.
-You can basically get all the music and television you
could want for around $20 a month. This is about the
same price you can lease one single textbook for.
He mentions that it is a bad message that we are sending to
learners. We say that your educational resources will be taken
away after you spent a lot money on them, and as a learner you
will never need them again.
Elementary and High Schools cannot buy expensive new
editions every time they come out. So, on average, an Elementary
or High School level book is around 10 years out of date.
He brings up the question that: if public grant money is used
to build courses or content, etc., should that not be under an open
license so that the rest of the public can use what they spend
money on?
-This has been happening. One example: Texas has gotten a
Department of Labor grant for 21 million dollars for make a
national STEM curriculum. The Department of Labor required
everyone to put a CC Attribution license on what they built with
the money.
70% of students are not buying all the books for their course.
-They either do not see the value or need financial help and
do not get the financial aid until the 2nd week of the
semester.
Kaleidoscope was a project that looked at how they could
get students all the resources they needed by day one of the class.
-Took OERs, made minor changes, and had open textbooks
in all the courses.
-Students were quite happy with the courses, and the
students’ outcomes all got better.
-This was a community college, so this provided
all these students with immediate resources for
the class that many would not have otherwise
gotten until about three weeks in (due to
financial aid issues or not knowing whether
buying the textbook would be worth it). When
the students were asked why they did so well,
they even replied with “I actually had my
resources on the first day”.
People ask, “How are you going to sustain OERs when they
are free?”
-Our existing model is unsustainable
-470,000 California students cannot get the simple
general education courses that they need.
-Average student graduates with 26,000 in debt.
-70% of students are not buying all of their textbooks.
-This country spends $80 billion on research;
researchers then give away the properties only to have
to buy them back to use them in any way.
-“If public funds are required of the openly licensed, we got
more OER folks than we know what to do with.”
-“Don’t just think about what you can share … but
think about what you can take!”
-There are billions of dollars of content being
produced.
OpenStax
-Has millions of dollars to build free open textbooks with a
Creative Commons Attribution license.
-Spending a ton of money to make them and hiring
PhDs to help build and maintain these books.
-Multiple digital formats
-With print on demand and getting your bookstores
involved, these books can be sold for a very small
amount in print to students.
California has taken out $5 million from public funds to
make their open textbooks. Anyone can use any of the 50. British
Colombia has looked at what California has been doing and is
planning on building 40 open textbooks.
-They collaborated on who was going to build which
textbooks so that there were not repeats, since all of
them will be open licensed.
-They collaborated with others who have been doing
this to see what is already out there, also.
Cable was building a technology plan for Washington state
community colleges. The plan was to share technology across all
the systems.
-They realized: it makes sense to share technology; it
should make sense to share content, too.
-It’s state money, and we all teach the same thing.
-He even did a data run on the highest enrolled
classes. They were all 101 courses. They all
taught the same thing in slightly different orders.
He talked to teachers and had teachers compare
syllabi, which was not exactly the same, but was
very similar.
-They talked to provosts about supplying new faculty
with these full open courses. Then, they have any of
those as an option when there is only 2 weeks for them
to get ready to teach their own course. If they do not
like something about the course, they can change it.
One system, in one state, and in one course, is spending 10
million dollars on English composition 1 textbooks.
-1/3 federal Pell grants
-1/3 State Need grant (comes out of state general
funds)
-1/3 out of student pocket (mostly debt)
-Dr. Green suggested to the legislature that they give
him a little bit of money to build the whole general
education curriculum for Washington state community
colleges, instead of just that one course, freely
available.
-In this Open Course Library, there are 42
courses already and 38 more are being built now.
These are courses open for taking by anyone.
http://opencourselibrary.org/
Finding, building, and adopting good courses are going to
take time and effort.
Existing business models are going to put up fights because
they are happy with the way things are.
Elsevier’s profit margin last year alone was 46%.
Publishers have been attempting to pass bills that stop
people from being able to build these courses.
None of the bills that were proposed were passed, however.
Governments seem to maybe be embracing this idea of open
access and of the public having access to what they have already
paid for.
He reminds us that our job as public servants is not to help
to maintain your bookstore’s current business model or to support
46% profit margins; it is to help the people get an education in the
most affordable and effective manner possible.
It is our job to use public funds efficiently, and, as
professors, librarians, etc., to share knowledge and use the tools of
the day as effectively as possible.
Non-rivalrous resources: if we share knowledge that we
have, our knowledge is not diminished at all.
We can share for almost no cost, give up nothing, share
knowledge with the world, and make sharing more efficient.
http://www.boundless.com
What are OERs according to boundless?
Boundless has open introductory textbooks in 19 subjects that
anyone can read online. There are also study materials on the site
that members can use, too (it’s free to be a member).
All content is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license
-“Anyone is welcome to quote, mashup, reuse, and republish
any portion of any book, anywhere, so long as proper citation is
given” (boundless.com)
Who’s using boundless?
Used by students in introductory-level courses.
Biggest users have been Boston University and Northeastern
University.
-In Boston University: Intro to Financial Accounting class,
20% have used the textbook and study tools that Boundless has
online.
-At Northeastern: 61% of into-level Psychology students
have registered and 50% of Accounting students in. Also, 27% of
students taking Macroeconomics are using Boundless.
Florida State University, University of Central Florida, and
University of Illinois are also using it a lot, according to
Boundless.
500,000 students at over half of U.S. colleges have used the
available materials.
What all do they provide?
Non-registered members:
-Anyone who goes to the website can access any of the 19
subjects and be directed to a textbook on the subject
-The textbook has a glossary at the end of each section
with key points from the section
-There is a search bar where someone could type in a
“concept”. When you do, it brings up related texts about whatever
it is you looked up (I think from the textbooks they already have
on the site).
Registered members:
-Can access flashcards, study guides, quizzes
-Can highlight and add notes to the text
-When accessing the notebook feature, can see notes that
others have written
-The website keeps track of what you have studied
-Can look up a book using their book’s ISBN numbers or the
title of their course
-Does not actually match the textbook a student would
be looking for, for the most part, but gives textbooks with a name
similar to the course they looked up.
https://www.boundless.com
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/startups/2013/05/boundless-bunortheastern-boston.html
http://blog.okfn.org/2012/05/10/boundless-learning-got-served-what-does-it-allmean-for-open-textbooks/
http://www.20mm.org/
What are OERs according to Twenty Million
Minds?
Twenty Million Minds believes in free online textbooks. They
hope to help teachers be able to create their own textbooks
tailored to their classes that they can put online and students
everywhere, not just in their university, can access for free.
Who’s using 20mm?
There has been specific outreach to California Community
Colleges.
This last fall, 55 professors had adopted the textbook and
altogether had 5,000 students using it through their adoptions
“The response has been phenomenal with College Physics
averaging more than 1,000 views a day with and Introduction to
Sociology with more than 10,000 learners,” said OpenStax
College Editor-in-Chief David Harris.
What all do they provide?
Non-registered members:
-There is one Sociology and one Physics book that any one
who goes onto the website can access and save as a pdf.
-Can highlight text, add sticky notes, speech bubbles,
arrows, can underline, and cross out words and save it all onto
your computer.
-Can navigate through the book quickly by clicking
links in the table of contents to chapters and pages.
-It most likely is licensed under Creative Commons license,
also.
Registered Members
-Registered faculty can create their own textbooks using
content from the 20mm library, their own computer files, and the
Internet in general.
-They then can publish their tailored textbook for
student use.
-Registered students and/or faculty can create a class/group
and collaboratively annotate the book (there is one Sociology
book on the 20mm site that can be used for this) or their own
uploaded documents (even their own book made from using
20mm) with their students.
-Can click on page numbers and will be taken directly to
that page
-They can also see activity that students in their
class/group have logged
-They can assign reading and other materials to students in
their group.
http://www.20mm.org
http://www.20mm.org/20-Million-Minds-Foundation-Saving-College-Students-1Million-this-Fall/News-38.html
https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/
What are OERs according to this?
This website has many open textbooks that anyone that goes onto
their website can access. The only people that need to register are
professors looking to change content or customize a pre-existing
open textbook.
Who’s using it?
Not many professors at University of Minnesota have adopted
books yet. Some professors are in the process of reviewing the
open textbooks to make sure they are legitimate. Other Big Ten
universities have been wanting to get involved, too. This is a
fairly new project, however.
What all does this provide?
The College of Education and Human Development at the
University of Minnesota has collected 84 open textbooks that
have already been used and are being used in classrooms across
America.
Visitors can choose one of ten University subjects and browse
through the available books on each one.
Visitors can search a book or subject name and relevant books
will pop up.
Depending on the book, there are online versions, pdfs, and
versions downloadable to kindles and the like.
-Online:
-There are links to click on that will take you right to
where you want to go in the book.
-Pdf:
-Can save as pdf and get all the annotational features
and go to specific parts of the textbook by clicking headings in the
table of contents.
-All books also have a print option, usually for under $40.
Instructors can edit and add their own content to the available
books
-Also licensed under the (CC BY-SA) license.
Working on getting some of the books reviewed by faculty to
make sure the books are legitimate and correct.
https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/10/university-minnesota-compilesdatabase-peer-reviewed-open-source-textbooks
http://www1.umn.edu/news/news-releases/2012/UR_CONTENT_383497.html
http://www.lumenlearning.com/
What are OER according to Lumen Learning?
Lumen brings together OER from all over the country and makes
a course outline out of a class with them.
What all do they provide?
A free framework for classes that brings together relevant
content from other OER.
-It seems like you’re reading a textbook, but you have
hyperlinks to articles, online videos, and more.
-Currently has frameworks for:
-English Composition
-Developmental Reading
-Developmental Writing
-College Success
-Beginning Algebra
-Intermediate Algebra
-The Algebra courses include video lessons and
practice problems, too.
Professors can edit the content that is already on the page and
add their own content, also. The site teaches them how to do it,
too.
-Also licensed under (CC BY-SA).
Works with teachers and collects data, which are analyzed
-Provides teacher with feedback on what did not work and
why and makes suggestions as to what may work better, of which
the teachers are free to reject.
www.lumenlearning.com
http://openstaxcollege.org/
What are OERs according to Openstaxcollege?
Openstaxcollege provides free peer-reviewed textbooks
What all does it provide?
Around 30 textbooks that students can read online or download
as a pdf with all the annotational features.
-With a pdf, students can click on links in the table of
contents to each chapter
-With the online version, there are links in the table of
contents down to each individual part under each heading within
each unit.
-There are also low-price print options.
Teachers, by signing in through Connexions, can edit, rearrange,
and add their own content to the textbooks on Openstax.
- Licensed under (CC-BY 3.0)
-Students also can change content to better understand
what they are reading.
http://openstaxcollege.org/
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
What are OERs according to MIT
OpenCourseWare?
MIT puts content from a majority of their actual courses online,
so that people who are not students can follow along and basically
take the class alongside students.
Who’s using MIT OCW?
Averages 1 million visitors a month
- +500,000 using the translated versions
-42% of users are students
-43% of users are self-learners
What all does this website provide?
Contains almost all of MIT’s courses’ content (2150 courses total)
-Users can enter a topic into a search bar, and relevant
articles, lecture notes, assignments, videos, and more pop up.
-Users can browse MIT courses by course number,
department, or topic, and relevant courses will pop up.
-You can download everything to your computer, but it
basically just links you to the website.
-Includes a syllabus
-Online lectures
-Downloadable with iTunes U and Internet Archive
-List of required readings (textbook information that one
would have to buy on Amazon and citations for the other required
readings, the one I looked up on Google I could find easily).
-Lecture notes
-Pdfs that include PowerPoints or word documents
with necessary vocab and concepts for the course
-Assignments to complete (including reading responses and
papers, activities and more.
-Study materials (include study guides and reviews)
-There are more widgets that can be added
-Some had calendar, demonstrations, exams and
quizzes that you can download and take.
-Offers courses in 8 different languages; there were a large
number of courses offered in each language, too.
-Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US)
-Can edit, shift things around, and add content
-Although I couldn’t figure out how to do that
http://openstaxcollege.org/
http://www.oercommons.org
What are OERs according to oercommons.org?
Oercommons brings together thousands of quality OERs,
including lectures, audio, videos, textbooks, activities, syllabi,
assessments, and more that is free for anyone to browse through
and use.
What all does oercommons.org provide?
Non-registered members
-Can browse OER according to what topic, subject, grade
level, and material type they are looking for.
-Material type includes full courses and textbooks,
along with online lectures, syllabi, homework, case studies and
more.
Registered Members
-Can tag, rate, and review resources
-Can save resources to their portfolio
-Can add private notes to items saved in their portfolio
-Can contribute their own material as long as they control
the copyright and the materials are in the public domain.
-Can make their own OER by mixing their own content and
OER content and picture, video, etc.
-Can then download and print your own OER and
share it with others.
-Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
-Can submit OER from other sites to oercommons that
they think would be useful as an OER.
http://www.oercommons.org