Open Education Resources

A Presentation by Quentin ViereggeUniversity of Wisconsin-Barron County

Thursdays at the UMarch 29th, 2012

How much does . . .

•it cost to gain access to the curriculum at MIT for a semester?

•it cost to buy (or rent) a English textbook or handbook on rhetoric (such as the Bedford or They Say / I Say)?

•it cost to assemble the work of thousands of teacher-scholars?

What are your answers?

Would you believe the answer is . . .

Zero

Agenda

•Define and Characterize OERs

•General Examples of OERs

•Writing Examples of OERs

•Introducing Writing Commons

•Ideas for how it could be used at UWBC

What are Open Education

Resources ?• “Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching,

learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits sharing, accessing, repurposing —including for commercial purposes —and collaborating with others” (Hal Plotkin, “Free to Learn” 1).

What are Open Education

Resources ?• “Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching

and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse, without charge. Open Educational Resources are different from other resources a teacher may use in that OER have been given limited or unrestricted licensing rights. That means they have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights” (OER Commons.org, “About”).

What can I do with OER resources?

• “For some of these resources, that means you can download the resource and share it with colleagues and students. For others, it may be that you can download a resource, edit it in some way, and then re-post it as a remixed work. OER often have a Creative Commons or GNU license that state specifically how the material may be used, reused, adapted, and shared” (OER Commons.org, “About”).

Characteristics of OERs

• Free

• Authoritative or Peer-Reviewed

•Reusable

•Revisable

•Under a Creative Commons License

image courtesy of creative commons.org

Can Edit, Remix, Sell, Distribute, But With Citation

Can Share, But Only With Citation and No Changes or Commerical Use

Can Edit, Remix, Sell, Distribute, But With Citation and Without Commercial Use

Can Edit, Remix, Distribute With Exact Same License and No

Commercial Use

What Can I Do With A Creative Commons License?

images and information courtesy of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

So what are some examples?

?

MIT Open Courseware

image courtesy of http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

How Can I Use MIT OCW?

(BY-NC-SA)Can use, edit, remix, and distribute non-commercially, with attribution, and the same license.

What type of creative commons license?

image and information courtesy of http://ocw.mit.edu

“The primary goal of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is to create awareness of OER and help colleges to identify, create and/or repurpose existing OER to improve teaching and learning and make education more accessible for all learners.  We are seeking the support of faculty to identify, review, evaluate, and make available high quality, accessible and culturally open educational resources” (Community College Consortium, “About”)

http://oerconsortium.org/

OER Commons

“But OER are not just free learning materials and resources. OER is also the underlying open, creative, collaborative process itself, one that enables continuous rapid improvements in the quality of both teaching and learning” (Hal Plotkin, “Free to Learn”).

Peer Production Technologies

Peer-Production Technologies

Flat World Knowledge

image and information courtesy of http://ocw.mit.edu

Writing Spacesimage and information courtesy of http://ocw.mit.edu

So what would be an example of courseware

that is not OER?

Harvard Law’s Course “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do

Welcome to Writing

Commons“Writing Commons aspires to be a community for writers, a creative learning space for students in courses that require college-level writing, a creative, interactive space for teachers to share resources and pedagogy” (Writing Commons, “Home”).

Welcome to Writing

Commons“Our primary goal is to provide the resources and community students need to improve their writing, particularly students enrolled in courses that require college-level writing.  As mentioned in 'About Us', we believe learning materials should be free for all students and teachers–part of the cultural commons” (Writing Commons, “Home”).  

So Is It Just About Money?

The assumption is that if we all teach our courses conscientiously, each of us making sure our demands are as clear and transparent as possible, our students will make coherent sense of our diverse perspectives and will eventually be socialized into our intellectual community. The problem is that, no matter how transparent each course is, as long as we know little about our colleagues’ courses our students figure to come away with confusingly mixed messages that will be hard to make sense of without more help than we are providing.” (Gerald Graff, “It’s Time to End Courseocentrism” Inside Higher Ed)

Connecting the Dots

“On the cultural side, OER have not been a part of pre-existing educational practices within the often tradition-bound higher education enterprise; on occasion, the reliance on sound, proven and reliable past practices can sometimes make it difficult for promising new teaching methods to gain momentum [ . . . ] The brightest and most dazzling teachers can light up a classroom but, unpreserved, that illumination is then usually lost forever, except in the minds and memories of a few fortunate student witnesses” (Hal Plotkin, “Free to Learn”)

Gift Culture

“Another benefit of opening up course materials comes when more people around the world see the quality of the academic culture on that campus. They can only join that campus culture by applying for admission to the college or university. This openness raises the general awareness of the institution’s academic offerings and stature around the world” -- Sally M. Johnstone, Educause

Showing Off What We Can Do At UWBC

•We could provide supplemental readings in the back of the syllabus.

•We could use OER print-on-demand when textbook fees are low (similar to Flatworld).

•We could create a student peer-reviewed journal similar to The Red Cedar but with academic papers.