What are Open Educational Resources (OERs)?
Just because a resource is available online does not make it an open educational resource (OER). Knowing what OERs are and how they work can help us navigate online resources to find ones that we can legally use, modify, and share.
What are OERs?
When we apply the core principles of open education to resources used for teaching, we get open educational resources.
OER are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain [or] have been released under an open license that permits access, use, repurposing, reuse and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.
From Atkins, Brown & Hammond (2007). A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities. Published with a CC-BY 3.0 license.
While OERs are available for free online, the open license allows you to legally engage with the resource in a much deeper way. Educational Exceptions in the Copyright Act allow for limited uses of resources inside of educational/classroom settings but leave room for debate and uncertainty.
Collectively, the ways that OERs can be used are known as the 5Rs. Click the plus signs on the image below to see different ways that OERs can be used.
Image by Designers for Learning: Gain Experience for Good by Jennifer Maddrell. Published with a CC-BY-NC-SA license.
Resources
An OER can allow for one, two, three, four, or all five of the 5R activities depending on the open license it was published with. This means that when we talk about OERs, there’s actually a spectrum of open-ness. The more of these 5Rs that you are able to use the resource for, the more open it is. What allows you to use the resource in these ways is the license that a resource was published under.
At the bottom of the following image, you can see how the different licenses allow for different activities.
Resources
To make a resource open is relatively straightforward.
Somewhere on the resource, indicate which Creative Commons license you are using. You can do this by either including the license image, or by writing out the license name and linking to it.
Best practice is to do both, for example:
Common Locations
- Website – Footer, home page
- Presentation – First slide; slide notes
- Document – Footer; title/cover page
- Open Textbooks – Metadata; front matter
If you cannot find the licensing information clearly displayed anywhere, assume that it is not openly licensed and you cannot use it.
This works in reverse too: if you have not placed the licensing information anywhere on your resource, it is not an OER – it’s not open.
Make sure you’ve attributed all of the pieces that were created by someone else, and note where you have made adaptations.
Attribution in open education follows a TASL format: Title, Author, Source and License.
The resource needs be published and shared somewhere where people can actually access and use it.
Publishing Options
Use a platform that has a catalogue
For example, KPU Pressbooks has its own Catalogue, and Pressbooks can add any Pressbook to the Pressbooks Directory for wider reach.
OER Repositories
There are many online repositories that specifically focus on hosting open educational resources. There are more general repositories like OER Commons and MERLOT, or repositories with a more targeted focus like the B.C. Open Collection (BCcampus) which contains open textbooks published in BC.
If a repository doesn’t quite fit your resource, you could also post a link to your project on a website, blog, or other public forum. However, this might be more difficult for people to find. One of the advantages to putting your resource in a repository is that it has a permanent home where people will always be able to access it.
Resources
Further Reading
Further Training
If you’re looking to deepen your understanding of open educational resources, below are some professional development opportunities.
Support at KPU
KPU Open is available to answer any questions you have about open, to provide training and resources, and to consult on how you can incorporate open practices.