Pros & Cons of OERsBy Melissa Stange

Lord Fairfax Community College

Purpose

The purpose of this presentation is to satisfy part of the requirements for the course “How to Use Open Educational Resources (OER)”, offered in 2015 by Washington Online.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) Defined

• UNESCO: "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.“

• The Cape Town Open Education Declaration: "[O]pen educational resources should be freely shared through open licenses which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet."

An OER Video To Explain OER

Video located on YouTube at http://youtu.be/ZFeyCc6we-s

Pros

• Reduces education cost to students

• Make learning global

• Provides student access to current technology material

• Promotes sharing, collaboration, and engagement

• Allows for course content to be validated by the world

• Better control of course content

• Any one can post material

One Reason Why OER is important

Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, gives an overview of OER and how it can be used to benefit people who might not otherwise have access to excellent, free educational resources.

Located on YouTube at http://youtu.be/OaJ7rAwBhbY

Cons

• Varying quality levels of OER material

• Time involved and vetting OER material

• No one-stop-shop for all OER repositories

• Some instructors are closed minded to OER use

• Owner of OER may change, modify, or delete without notice

• Lack of understanding between OER and Online material

• Learners without 24/7 Web access may not be able to access material

How most Open Educational Resources fail to meet the UNESCO definition of OER

Video can be found on YouTube at http://youtu.be/n1M4eEKvsCo

OER Search Engines ExamplesThese are standalone search engines that find OER content from different places.

• ARIADNE search engine within the ARIADNE for European OER content

• Jorum - "free learning and teaching resources, created and contributed by teaching staff from UK Further and Higher Education Institutions"

• OER Commons - "Find Free-to-Use Teaching and Learning Content from around the World. Organize K-12 Lessons, College Courses, and more."

• Temoa - "a knowledge hub that eases a public and multilingual catalog of Open Educational Resources (OER) which aims to support the education community to find those resources and materials that meet their needs for teaching and learning through a specialized and collaborative search system and social tools."

• University Learning = OCW+OER = Free custom search engine - a meta-search engine incorporating many different OER repositories (uses Google Custom Search)

• XPERT - "a JISC funded project to explore the potential of delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources created and seamlessly published through the open source e-learning development tool called Xerte Online Toolkits. The aim of XPERT is to progress the vision of a distributed architecture of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use."

• OER Dynamic Search Engine - a wiki page of OER sites with accompanied search engine (powered by Google Custom Search)

OER Repository Examples

• Open Washington - http://www.openwa.org/find-oer/

• Flicker - https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

• OpenStax College Courseware - http://openstaxcollege.org/

• Skills Commons - https://www.skillscommons.org\

• National Training & Education Resource - www.nterlearning.org

• Academic Earth - http://academicearth.org/

• Connexions - http://cnx.org/

• CSTC (Computing Science Teaching Center) - http://www.cstc.org/

• Merlot - http://www.merlot.org

• OER Equella - http://oer.equella.com/access/home.do

Florida's Orange Grove Repository

Located on YouTube at http://youtu.be/xv8R7-gALoo

Some Projects Using OER

• Z Degrees – Tidewater Community College

• Knowledge to work – Lord Fairfax Community College

• OER Research Hub – OER Hypotheses & Impact Maps

• OER Impact Map

• Boston Children’s Hospital project OPENPediatrics launches new OER resource

A Few Things To Remember

• Everything online is not an OER

• As with anything, OER has pros and cons

• Using OERs in the classroom takes more time than selecting a textbook

• Creative Commons is a critical in the OER world

• OERs come in different forms and quality levels