Private: Using OER

5 OER, Open Textbooks, and Open Courses

Open education is an idea, as well as a set of content, practices, policy, and community which, properly leveraged, can help everyone in the world access free, effective, open learning materials at no cost.[1] For the first time in history, educators around the world can create and share high-quality, effective learning materials with everyone who wants to learn. The key to this transformational shift in learning is Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are educational materials that are free to access, with legal permissions for the public to use, share, and build upon them.

The reason why OER are such powerful tools is because:

  • open educational resources are primarily digital[2] and can be stored, copied, and distributed for near-zero cost;
  • the internet makes it simple for the public to share digital content easily and on a global scale; and
  • Creative Commons licenses make it simple and legal to retain copyright and legally share educational resources with the world.

In contrast to traditional education materials, which are constantly becoming more expensive and less flexible, OER provide everyone, everywhere, free permission to download, edit, and share them with others. David Wiley provides another popular definition, stating that only education materials licensed in a manner that provide the public with permission to engage in the 5R activities can be considered OER.

The 5 Rs include:

  • Retain – permission to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
  • Reuse – permission to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
  • Revise – permission to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
  • Remix – permission to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
  • Redistribute – permission to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of to a friend)

The easiest way to confirm that an educational resource is an *open* educational resource is to determine that the resource is either in the public domain or has been licensed under a Creative Commons license that permits the creation of derivative works – CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, or CC BY-NC-SA.

Why does this matter?

Formal education, even in the age of the internet, can be more expensive and less flexible than ever. In many countries, publishers of education materials overcharge for textbooks and other resources. As part of their transition from print to digital, these same companies have largely moved away from a model where learners purchase and own books to a “streaming” model where they have access for a limited time.

Further, publishers are constantly developing restrictive technologies that limit what learners and faculty can do with the resources they have temporary access to, including inventing novel ways to prohibit printing, prevent cutting and pasting, and restrict the sharing of materials between friends.

Does it seem reasonable that education in the age of the internet should be more expensive and less flexible than it was in previous generations? As people and knowledge are increasingly networked and available online, what will it mean for learning, work, and society?

Watch the video below, “Why OER?” to learn more:

In addition to demonstrating that learners save money when their teachers adopt OER, research shows that learners can have better outcomes when their teachers choose OER instead of education materials available under all rights reserved copyright.

The idea of OER is strongly advocated by a broad range of individuals, organizations, and governments, as evidenced by documents like the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2007) and Cape Town +10 (2017), the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration (2012), UNESCO Ljubljana OER Action Plan (2017), and the UNESCO OER Recommendation (in draft, as of December, 2018).

OER and OER Textbooks

OER come in all shapes and sizes. A piece of OER can be as small as a single video or simulation, and can be as large as an entire degree program. It can be time consuming for teachers to assemble OER into a collection comprehensive enough to replace an all rights reserved copyright textbook. For this reason, OER are often collected and presented in ways that resemble a traditional textbook in order to make them easier for instructors to understand and adopt.

The term “open textbook” simply means a collection of OER that have been organized to look like a traditional textbook in order to ease the adoption process. To see examples of open textbooks in a number of disciplines, visit OpenStax,the Open Textbook Library, or the BC Open Textbook Project.

Other times, OER are aggregated and presented as digital courseware. To see examples of open courseware, visit the Open Education Consortium and MIT OCW.

OER v. Free Library Resources

Instructors typically use a mix of all-rights-reserved commercial content, free library resources, and OER in their courses. While the library resources are “free” to the learners and faculty at that institution, they are (a) not “free” as the institution library has to pay to purchase or subscribe to them, and (b) not available to the general public. This chart describes the cost to learners and the legal permissions available to teachers and learners for each of these types of educational resources.

“Affordability Matrix” by David Wiley, licensed CC BY 4.0. 
Cost to Students Permissions for Teachers and Students
Commercial Textbooks Expensive Restrictive
Library Resources Free Restrictive
Open Educational Resources Free 5Rs

Open Educational Resources (A Very Brief Timeline)

While there isn’t enough space in this short space to give a comprehensive overview of the “History of Open Education,” here are several pivotal events that contributed to the growth of the open education movement.[3]

Final Remarks

OER, whether organized as open textbooks or opencourseware, provide teachers, learners, and others with a broad range of permissions that make education more affordable and more flexible. These permissions also enable rapid, low-cost experimentation and innovation, as educators seek to maximize access to effective educational resources for all.

  1. This chapter is adapted from The Creative Commons' CC Certificate Resources, Chapter 5: Creative Commons For Educators, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. ↵
  2. Most OER are “born” digital, though OER can be made available to learners in both digital and printed formats. Of course, digital OER are easier to share, modify, and redistribute, but being digital is not what makes something an OER. ↵
  3. If you know of additional critical events to include, please tell us and we will update the timeline. ↵

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

OER Primer for Iowa Regents Institutions Copyright © by Mahrya Burnett; Abbey Elder; and Anne Marie Gruber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.