Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources: An Overview

For an overview of open educational resources, please watch this brief video (2:09 minutes):

 

Open Educational Resources: Toward A Definition

Open Educational Resources (OERs) carry similar definition problems that the word “open” does alone. There is not one central definition of OER as we can see from these sources:

  • Open Educational Resources 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 and 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. (Hewlett Foundation Links to an external site.)
  • Open Educational Resources are freely accessible, openly licensed Links to an external site. documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. (Wikipedia Links to an external site.)
  • Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution. (UNESCO Links to an external site.)
  • The term "Open Educational Resource(s)" (OER) refers to educational resources (lesson plans, quizzes, syllabi, instructional modules, simulations, etc.) that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing. (The OER Handbook Links to an external site.) 

Defining OERs for the Purposes of this Course

For this course we will define OERs by their adherence to five criteria. The intention is not to discretely label learning materials as either OER or not OER, rather to identify where along a spectrum of openness the materials reside. The criteria we will use to do this are referred to as the five Rs of OER (Wiley, 2014): Links to an external site.

  • Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
  • Reuse – the right 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 – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
  • Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
  • Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)