Open Education Resources (OERs)

When I read a recent article in Tech & Learning about OER Commons, it stimulated my interest in writing an article about how far the OER movement has progressed.

Open Education Global is a member-driven, non-profit organization supporting the development and use of open education around the world. When I served as president at the American Public University System (APUS), our journal editor, Melissa Layne, was a director of OE Global’s predecessor organization.

OE Global has an excellent definition of Open Education Resources that I will cite below.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

OER are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.

OER come with 5R permissions including the permission to:

  1. Retain – the right to create, own, and control copies of the content;
  2. Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways;
  3. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself;
  4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new;
  5. Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, the revisions, or the remixes with others.

OER can include textbooks, instructional materials, interactive simulations, lesson plans, full courses, and even complete degrees (often called Z-Degrees). A popular example of OER is open textbooks that are funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost offering significant savings, compared to expensive proprietary textbooks. OER provide academic freedom to customize, localize, translate, and update as required. OER expand and enhance the academic offering of an institution.

OER are typically stored and distributed through web sites, platforms or repositories that provide search, view, and download capabilities.

OER Commons is one of several Open Education Resources sites that I have accessed. OpenStax which is sponsored by Rice University is another that I have perused as is Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg has accumulated more than 60,000 eBooks, many of them classics whose copyrights have expired in the United States. MIT’s Open Courseware site is popular for its STEM textbooks and open courses. There are many more sites. Norfolk State University has an excellent Library Guide with links to more than 20 of the world’s OER sites. To the best of my knowledge, no one has attempted to organize the all-encompassing OER site that includes links to all the world’s open education resources. It may be an impossible task as I am sure that open education resources are being developed and made accessible to educators every day.

In 2001, APUS decided to offer a textbook grant for every undergraduate student that covered the cost of textbooks. We used a book vendor that would ship physical textbooks to our online students wherever they resided around the world. As our online enrollments grew, we expanded our library resources, and our librarians began working with our faculty to locate and utilize e-books and OER resources to lower the cost of textbooks. As the OER movement grew, we were able to find more and more open resources for our courses. I was fortunate to have three provosts (Dr. Frank McCluskey, Dr. Karan Powell, and Dr. Vernon Smith) during my tenure as APUS president who were committed to widely using OER in our courses for the ongoing benefit to our students.

At some point, APUS switched to a textbook vendor that was savvier about e-books and OER. That vendor allowed us to add OER to their platform to facilitate a single distribution site for OER for each of our students. Over time, we began to identify and utilize OER for our master’s courses as well. Degree programs that fully utilized OER were internally noted as Z-Degrees, a notation that OE Global uses in its description.

APUS’s commitment to contributing to the global open education community led us to co-sponsor the International Journal of Open Education Resources with the Policy Studies Organization.

This past May, I met the co-founder and CEO of a company, BibliU that has built an electronic textbook and courseware distribution system that is agnostic to whether faculty responsible for building courses at colleges and universities select copyrighted textbooks or OER for their courses. BibliU is not only committed to providing more affordable learning content, but their Learning Enablement platform is designed to improve student learning outcomes through its integration with the Learning Management System (LMS) utilized by their college and university clients. BibliU states that their platform offers more than two million learning assets currently utilized by more than 100 universities and colleges. Its integration of tools for faculty and students into its platform is very sophisticated and worthy of a separate blog post by me in the future.

The OER movement is strong and appears to be gaining strength worldwide. There are many organizations working separately and together to make this happen. I like the fact that learning resource distributors like BibliU have structured a platform to provide OER and copyrighted textbooks side-by-side in sophisticated search criteria along with recommendations from previous users. Tools like theirs make it easier to access and utilize these resources.

While there does not appear to be a single source that has indexed OER, textbook platforms are providing access to the resources as they are identified and utilized. Even if you don’t have access to a platform like BibliU’s, Google Scholar provides links to resources that can quickly be identified as those behind paywalls and those that are open resources. With more access to open learning content as well as open courseware, the value of proprietary course content will change. Ultimately, colleges may have price their courses and programs based on the value of their outcomes because the content is available for free to everyone. I hope to see that happen.

Subjects of Interest

EdTech

Higher Education

Independent Schools

K-12

Student Persistence

Workforce