Edsurge

APRIL 19, 2022

These days low-cost alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, are getting a boost as a potential solution. Last week, for example, Lumen Learning, a company that sells low-cost OER textbooks and courseware, announced it received a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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OER Course Education Classroom 152

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 Instructional Materials Outcomes 107

Iterating Toward Openness

APRIL 11, 2022

I’ve been interested in sustainability models for OER for decades. And for just as long, I’ve believed that there are useful lessons for us to learn on this topic from open source software – OER’s far more popular and influential sibling. What does “bug” mean in the context of OER?

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OER Analysis Software Outcomes 147

Edsurge

NOVEMBER 15, 2021

For some folks in higher ed, the very idea of using open educational resources (OER) sparks dread. The right OER provides professors opportunities to teach the latest research and even make areas like math and science more inclusive. EdSurge: Why are you such a proponent of OER in higher ed? Here’s how I look at it.

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OER STEM Education Resources 161

Edsurge

JULY 11, 2022

They were trying to prep summer courses by linking to the freely available, openly licensed alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, content offered by Lumen Learning, a courseware provider that argues that OER can be a tool in making higher education more equitable. Hi OER Friends! There was confusion. “Hi

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OER Course Chegg Education 174

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 Instructional Materials Education 127

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 Assessment Libraries Education 186

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 Education Resources Examples 150

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 Education 297

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. That the U.S. Photo by Jake Blucker on Unsplash.

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OER Education Technology Resources 150

Iterating Toward Openness

JUNE 23, 2020

I wanted to include a reading summarizing my current thinking on ‘evaluating the impact of OER’ in the course, so I’m letting some thoughts spill out below. In the past I’ve written frequently about how we evaluate the impact of OER use. and more OER impact research should follow that lead. versus 2.6).

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OER Education Course Classroom 163

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Student: I’ll study whether students learn better with OER than with traditional course materials! ” In other words, when you read OER research that shows a difference in student learning, look harder – there’s likely more going on than just a change in materials. Me: Let’s hear it!

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OER Comparison Study iPad 116

The Journal

MAY 2, 2016

Expanding the conversation around "Reinventing Curriculum": In this week’s blog post, Superintendent Dan Lawson explains how his district is creating OER curricula. Dan's post is a thought-provoking response to our earlier blog post about the challenges teachers face in creating OER materials.

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OER Examples 273

The Journal

JANUARY 3, 2017

While OER marketplaces tend to tout the amount and types of content on offer, we must remind ourselves that content is not curriculum — and it is curriculum that teachers actually want. We go on to describe the life-cycle of a digital lesson — and argue that support for all the life cycle phases is only just beginning to be provided.

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OER 276

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 Education Resources Accessibility 119

Iterating Toward Openness

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

Last week I promised I would write a few posts about reducing friction with regard to OER. In last week’s post I talked about how we’re making it ridiculously easy for students, faculty, and others to contribute to the maintenance and improvement of OER. This is still a very real risk for OER. ” you might ask.

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OER Secondary Outcomes LMS 94

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 Course 124

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 Education Resources 225

The Journal

JULY 11, 2017

Finally, OER is coming of age!

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OER Education Resources Course 303

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 Education Classroom 170

The Journal

JUNE 5, 2017

In this week’s blog post, we argue that in the "new" world of OER-based lessons, teachers again must be supported in managing the full life-cycle of a lesson. In the "old" paper world, teachers had evolved a comfortable process for managing the life-cycle of a lesson; developing, distributing, enacting, assessing, reflecting, sharing.

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OER Assessment 223

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 Education Resources Accessibility 109

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 Assessment Education 114

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. I’ve written about this in general terms before, but with more time to ponder I now have a much clearer – and simpler – understanding of the problem.

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OER Libraries Accessibility Education 106

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. Consider the following scenarios: A person downloads an OER to their laptop.

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OER LMS Laptops Resources 84

The CoolCatTeacher

JUNE 7, 2015

Award Winning Science Teacher Amy Pace Shares How She Uses OER Textbooks Amy Pace is a Presidential Award winning science teacher. She is using “free” OER textbooks for all her courses. OER stands for Open Education Resources which are often curated by experts via grants and other means. OER Resource Roundup by Edutopia.

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OER Classroom Resources Education 150

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 Learning Education Libraries 113

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 Education 110

Iterating Toward Openness

AUGUST 27, 2019

As the movement grew and more people began advocating for the adoption of OER in place of traditionally copyrighted materials in classes, some advocates chose to make cost the primary focus of their advocacy. Materials that were openly licensed and free were the OER we had spent the last decade advocating for. grey below).

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OER Advocacy Libraries Policies 111

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 Education Technology 123

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 Education Course Resources 150

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. Increasingly, the answer is the campus library.

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OER Libraries lynda.com Education 161

Iterating Toward Openness

MARCH 11, 2020

In the first installment on Monday, I explained how a fundamental failure to understand copyright makes the definition of OER in the new UNESCO recommendation nonsensical. In the second installment yesterday, I described how it appears that many in the OER community have taken their eye off the ball of student learning.

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OER Case Study System Learning 78

Edsurge

JANUARY 15, 2019

But fans of OER are increasingly facing a problem. While OER started off as free online textbooks, it still costs money to produce these materials, and professors often need guidance finding which ones are high quality. So OER advocates are realizing they need to change their pitch.

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OER Education Resources Course 132

Iterating Toward Openness

JANUARY 31, 2020

I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. There are some things about working with OER that are just harder or more painful than they need to be, and getting more people actively involved in using OER will require us to reduce or eliminate those points of friction.

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OER LMS Course Google 102

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 112

Iterating Toward Openness

NOVEMBER 8, 2017

The inclusive access model’s goal of reducing the cost of textbooks apparently reminded the article’s author of OER, because she includes some discussion of OER toward the end of the article. And obviously, both inclusive access and OER are about solving the cost problem. Can you see it? A distraction.

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OER Accessibility Pearson Education 159