Open educational resources
Open educational resources (OER)[1] are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify.
[13] The 2019 UNESCO definition describes OER as "teaching, learning and research materials that make use of appropriate tools, such as open licensing, to permit their free reuse, continuous improvement and repurposing by others for educational purposes.
"[15] Often cited is the 2007 report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation which defined OER as "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.
"[16] The Foundation later updated its definition to describe OER as "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."
[17][18] In a 2022 overview of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's activities supporting open education since 2002, the Foundation describes OER as "freely licensed, remixable learning resources",[19] further including the Creative Commons definition of OER as "teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities – retaining, remixing, revising, reusing and redistributing the resources.
[22][23] The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines OER as: "digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research.
[11][34] In open education, there is an emerging effort by some accredited institutions to offer free certifications, or achievement badges, to document and acknowledge the accomplishments of participants.
[55] In a first manifestation of this movement, MIT entered a partnership with Utah State University, where assistant professor of instructional technology David Wiley set up a distributed peer support network for the OCW's content through voluntary, self-organizing communities of interest.
[58] The report "Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources",[59] published in May 2007, is the main output of the project, which involved a number of expert meetings in 2006.
"[78] As part of the Open Education Group, Hilton (2016, 2019[79])[80] reviewed studies on OER with the focus on Cost, Outcomes, and Perceptions, finding that most of the studies (e.g. Fischer, Hilton, Robinson, & Wiley, 2015;[81] Lovett, Meyer, & Thille, 2008;[82] Petrides, Jimes, Middleton-Detzner, Walling, & Wiess, 2011[83]) had found that OER improve student learning while significantly reducing the cost of their educational resources (e.g. textbooks).
[93] Open educational practices are defined as, for example, "a set of activities around instructional design and implementation of events and processes intended to support learning.
[95][96][97][98][99][6] A 2023 study co-authored by the Public Interest Research Group and Michelson 20MM Foundation found that 65% of student respondents skipped out on textbooks or course materials because they were too expensive.
However, to date there has been limited presentation of concrete data to back up this assertion, which reduces the effectiveness of such arguments and opens the OER movement to justified academic criticism.
[106][107][108] United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is taking a leading role in "making countries aware of the potential of OER.
"[109] The organisation has instigated debate on how to apply OERs in practice and chaired vivid discussions on this matter through its International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP).
As of 2022, many institutions of higher education provide a broad range of support for instructors and faculty incorporating open practices, including the adoption, modification and creation of OER.
[11][113] Support provided may include financial stipends, course release, instructional design assistance, research expertise and recognition in retention, promotion and tenure.
The SkillsCommons content exceeded two million downloads in September 2019 and at that time was considered to be the world's largest repository of open educational and workforce training materials.
In contrast to user-generated content libraries, OpenStax hires subject matter experts to create college-level textbooks that are peer-reviewed, openly licensed, and available online for free.
In 2003, the ownership of Wikipedia and Wiktionary projects was transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization whose goal is to collect and develop free educational content and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
[131] The Saylor Foundation makes use of university and college faculty members and subject experts to assist in this process, as well as to provide peer review of each course to ensure its quality.
[132] In 2010 the University of Birmingham and the London School of Economics worked together on the HEA and JISC funded DELILA project, the main aim of the project was to release a small sample of open educational resources to support embedding digital and information literacy education into institutional teacher training courses accredited by the HEA including PGCerts and other CPD courses.
In 2010, the AVU developed the OER Repository which has contributed to increase the number of Africans that use, contextualize, share and disseminate the existing as well as future academic content.
Courses were stripped down to the Learning Outcomes and rebuilt using openly licensed content, reviewed and selected by the faculty developer based on its ability to facilitate student achievement of the objectives.
The objectives of the project are: To increase the level of national collaboration between universities and educational organisations in the use and production of OER, To find effective online methods to support teachers and students, in terms of quality, technology and retrievability of OER, To raise awareness for the potential of webinars as a tool for open online learning, To increase the level of collaboration between universities' support functions and foster national resource sharing, with a base in modern library and educational technology units, and To contribute to the creation of a national university structure for tagging, distribution and storage of OER.
[140] CK-12 provides free and fully customizable K-12 open educational resources aligned to state curriculum standards and tailored to meet student and teacher needs.
[144] In 2015, the University of Idaho Doceo Center launched open course content for K-12 schools, with the purpose of improving awareness of OER among K-12 educators.
Today, OER initiatives across the United States rely on individual college and university librarians to curate resources into lists on library content management systems called LibGuides.
[155] With the advent of growing international awareness and implementation of open educational resources, a global OER logo was adopted for use in multiple languages by UNESCO.
It seeks to understand in what ways, and under what circumstances can the adoption of OER address the increasing demand for accessible, relevant, high-quality and affordable post-secondary education in the Global South.
