Open Education Resources

Michele Ogle, Ellen Murphy, Joyce McKnight, Claire Miller, Hui-ya Chuang, Robert Kester,

Rebecca Bonanno, Katarina Pisutova, Suzanne Hayes, Kathleen Stone, Deb Staulters

About the OER Task Force

This working group will explore the possibilities of

emerging learning resources and make recommendations

to the center to identify and include these resources in

our courses and open learning initiatives.

Definitions of Openness

Creative Commons License Open CourseWare

About Open CourseWare (OCW)

Just as open source software became available and was appreciated in the world

of computer software, a similar movement began in academia to make

educational content more freely available. With widespread internet access

available, individuals in academia wished to use the internet to share learning

content and even to provide the content of entire courses to the world at large,

which prompted institutional discussions about who owns knowledge.

MITOPENCOURSEWARE In 1999 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched the first

offerings of free MIT Open CourseWare, which consists primarily of lecture

notes, videos of lectures, and other materials. These materials are meant as

resources for reuse by educators, and proper attribution to the original MIT faculty

author(s) is required. According to MIT’s website (http://mit.ocw.edu) almost all

their 2000+ courses are available with this disclaimer:

“•OCW is not an MIT education.

•OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.

•OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.

•Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.”

MIT’s OCW Scholar courses are more complete and contain multimedia

resources for use by independent learners. These 7 courses are more complete

and contain multimedia resources to aid learning. MITx will offer a first

experimental course in March 2012, with additional offerings planned for

September. These MITx courses feature interactive instruction, communication

with professor, individual assessment, and ability to earn certificates.

(http://mitx.mit.edu)

(image credit: http://ocwconsortium.org CC: BY 3.0)

The Open CourseWare Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org) grew out of

early work in open courseware. There are 250+ member institutions worldwide,

and the consortium is sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

plus the Sustaining Members listed here:

The OCW Consortium provides a means to search for open courses available

through the member institutions, and also to provide assistance to member

institutions in developing and organizing their own open courseware offerings.

Courses are available in languages other than English, and course search by

language is available on the web site.

In addition to these examples, an internet search of “open courseware” or “open

educational resources” will yield many more examples.

OER University

Badges

WikiEducator

Lifelong Learning

There is an increase in employers requiring employees to have very specific skills

beyond what they may have acquired through traditional educational routes.

Learning takes place in many places and through many different ways. Open

educational courses have sparked a growing interest in how to assess and

recognize learning that takes place outside of the traditional classroom. For

example, the Learning Resource taskforce members have been taking the

Openness in Education course, which does not award college credit, but helps

those taking it to learn new skills.

What are Badges?

Badges are an answer to the need to recognize learning that takes place through

alternative methods. It is the age old idea of lifelong learning, but for the 21st

century. Badges are a visual representation of ones skills and achievements.

They can be collected on websites, resumes, job boards, and more. Badges can

represent small task completions all the way up to very in depth complicated

skills. They are housed on the web and contain metadata that can link back to the

specific achievements and evaluation used to earn the badge.

What is WikiEducator?

WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative:

• planning of education projects linked with the development of free content;

• development of free content on WikiEducator for e-learning;

• work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs;

• networking on funding proposals developed as free content.

History

WikiEducator was created in 2006 at the University of New Zealand – originally

as experimental wiki for sharing educational resources. Managed by Open

Education Resource (OER) Foundation with support from Commonwealth of

Learning and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, WikiEducator keeps

gaining contributing educators worldwide. Free online trainings focused on Wiki

skills for educators started in 2007. By 2008, WikiEducator had almost 6,000

registered users.

Strategy

“WikiEducator aims to build a thriving and sustainable global community

dedicated to the design, development and delivery of free content for learning in

realisation of a free version of the education curriculum by 2015.”

http://wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:About

What are they?

The Creative Commons Licenses are a spectrum of usable licenses that, when applied

to creative works allow users to remix, reuse and build upon creative works in different

ways and with varying levels of permission. Placing the license on a creative work also

allows it to be found more easily online, and each license makes it clear how and

whether or not a creative work can legally and rightfully used.

Each Creative Commons license is made up of three layers:

• CC Rights Expression Language – the “machine readable” layer

• Legal code – the traditional layer of legal language

• Commons Deed – the “human readable” layer

The 3 layers relate

The 3 layers relate directly to the 3 major

players of content creation on the web:

1. content creators,

2. content users, and

3. the web.

Each layer has a role to play in the value and

meaning of the license. No matter who you

are, there is one layer of the license you can

easily interpret, and therefore, use.

Image credit: www.creativecommons.org CC-BY

Design Rationale

CC Licenses:

Strike a balance between copyright law and individual creators’ ability to make use

of their work;

Provide a simple, standardized way of giving and/or limiting permissions to the use

of creative work of all kinds;

Allow anyone to obtain and maintain credit for their work;

Have universal meaning and recognition;

Are perpetual;

Have no impact on existing legal freedoms or exceptions, and

Present no technological restrictions to access of content.

CC Licenses + Users = Open Content

Open content is any content found online that can be copied, edited, revised, reused

and redistributed, legally. This includes educational content!

The Licenses

Workshops

Learning4Content Workshops are continuously offered

around the globe as online and face-to-face sessions.

These workshops are still offered free of charge for

participants due to the support from William and Flora

Hewlett Foundation.

Mozilla Open Badges

Mozilla is currently leading the way in developing an

open badge infrastructure. This infrastructure will

provide a means for issuing, earning, and displaying

the badges. The idea is that issuers of badges will be

able to award badges through the infrastructure and

learners will have a “badge backpack” on the system

to contain them. The technology is currently be

developed and piloted by a joint venture with Mozilla

and the Peer 2 Peer University for courses in web

development, with the full launch to occur early in

2012.

License

Open Universities: A group of universities from all over the world that host research

opportunities and academic programs with a goal of increasing accessibility for all -

including those in developing nations - to the right to education and lifelong learning

opportunities.

Open Textbook: high-quality college texts offered online under a license that allows

free digital access and low-cost print options. Students can read the full text free

online, download a printable PDF, or purchase a hard copy at a fraction of the cost of

traditional books.

Open Educational Resource (OER): teaching and learning materials that are freely

available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-

learner. They usually have a Creative Commons License associated with them

(remember: just because something is on the web, it does not make it free nor an

OER).

Open Courseware (OCW): free and available digital publications of high quality,

university‐level educational material organized and presented as courses. OCW often

include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content.

Open Badges: Badges provide a way for learners to get recognition for gaining new

skills and experience using the web and other digital learning environments. Badges

are visual representations of 21st century skills and achievements that learners can

display to potential employers, schools, colleagues and their community.

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC): an open, participatory course that is

distributed over the internet, and seeks to promote lifelong, networked learning. It has

some of the same elements as an online course - students, content, instruction; a

MOOC also provides a variety of ways to connect and collaborate with others while

gaining digital skills.

Learning Objective Repository (LOR): a digital library. It enables educators to

store, share, manage and use and reuse educational resources, content, and/or

assets.

Open Licenses: A license is a document that specifies what can and cannot be done

with a work (whether sound, text, image or multimedia). It grants permissions and

states restrictions. Broadly speaking, an open license is one which grants permission

to access, re-use and redistribute a work with few or no restrictions.

Open Source: The term came out of the world of software development, and was

originally used as a way to describe software source code and demonstrate how it's

developed. The basic principles of “open source” are: Openness, transparency,

collaboration, diversity, and reusability.

Open Access: refers to unrestricted access and reuse of (via the Internet) articles

published in scholarly journals and books.

Image available from MozillaWiki under CC-BY-SA

(Image credit to http://wikieducator.org)

What is OERu?

Open Education Resource University (OERu) is an international partnership of

accredited universities, colleges and polytechnics coordinated by the OER

foundation. Its main goal is to widen access and reduce the cost of tertiary study

for learners who are excluded from the formal education sector.

How does it Work?

OERu students gain free access to courses that are designed for independent-

study using OER. OERu learners will receive student support through a global

network of volunteers and peer support using social software technologies.

Students can be assessed for a fee by participating institutions and earn a

credible credential.

(Image credit to http://wikieducator.org)

This poster licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License 3.0