In the evolving landscape of education, Open Educational Resources (OER) offer innovative ways to enhance learning and teaching. This chapter explores key considerations for using or creating OER, focusing on several critical aspects. First, it examines how incorporating OER can improve course content and delivery. Understanding the audience is crucial for tailoring OER to meet specific learner needs effectively. The chapter also addresses the importance of determining whether the necessary OER already exists and how students will access these resources. Finally, it highlights the training and information required to effectively use OER. By addressing these factors, educators can make informed decisions and maximize the impact of OER in their teaching practices.

How will using OER improve your course?

When integrating OER into your course, you have the opportunity to critically evaluate your teaching methods and alter them to better meet your needs. Open education is a movement that supports innovative teaching. By using OER in a course, you are opening up new possibilities for greater diversification, multidisciplinary learning, and student engagement.

One way to go about this is to use backward design for your project.

Backward design is a framework for planning your course around its intended outcomes.^[2] Backwards design is a way to solidify more abstract course outcomes, such as critical and creative thinking, in order to ensure that students are actively engaged with the material they are being taught. There are three stages to the backward design process:

Backward Design Chart by EUGENIA IDA EDWARD

1. Identify desired results,
2. Determine acceptable evidence, and
3. Plan learning experiences and instruction.^[3]

You might notice that this approach does not end with “create and/or curate educational content.” Instead, it ends with more planning. The purpose of backward design is not to be done with your course transformation in a quick 3-step process. Instead, it asks educators to question the processes and materials they currently use and to start over by plotting out what is needed to meet your course outcomes.

Who is your audience?

Once you’ve decided what you want students to learn, you are ready to think about what resources you can use. As you begin to look for OER for your course, it’s important to consider your target audience(s).

Although your OER may be used by educators around the world, you can create it with your local audience in mind. Often times, culturally relevant examples allow students to engage with work on a more personal level. Although perfectly ‘open’ resources would not include culturally specific examples, jargon, or humor, the ability to alter OER allows for adaptation to fit new audiences, without sacrificing engagement for the original target audience. ^[4]

Does the OER you need already exist?

It is generally a good idea to look around at what content is available for your course before creating something new. There are three reasons for this:

1. The OER you want to create/use may already exist in the format you want, or you may be able to easily convert it to the appropriate format.
2. You may be able to remix an existing OER in order to meet your course needs.
3. Your own teaching materials could be adapted for use as OER. For example, lecture notes can be an invaluable teaching aid for courses with no excellent textbooks available. Consider asking students who have taken the course what they feel are the most useful resources for the course.

More information about locating OER is available in the Finding OER Chapter.

How will students access your course OER?

Whether you are using an OER as-is or creating something from scratch, one of the first considerations you should take into account is how you will share the resource(s) with students in your class.

What training or information do you need to use OER?

Using an OER can feel daunting, especially if you’ve not considered locating, licensing, and hosting OER before.  Integrating an existing OER into your curriculum doesn’t need to be exclusively your job. Training, like the module you are reading now, can provide basic information on these topics.

This chapter outlined some high level considerations to keep in mind when transforming your course to use OER. One aspect of OER not covered here, however, is how to make an OER “open” and what that means. To answer that question, in the next chapter we’ll discuss the role that copyright plays in an OER’s development and dissemination.

Footnotes

All OER are distributed under some form of open license, which provides a set of authorized permissions from the rights-holder for any and all users. The most popular of these licenses are Creative Commons (CC) licenses, which are customizable copyright licenses that enable others to reuse, adapt, and republish content with minimal or no restrictions. CC licenses allow creators to clearly state how their works can be used by others. When you encounter a work with a CC license, you can easily understand how to incorporate it into your course. By assigning an open license to your own work, you grant all users the rights specified by the license, and you cannot restrict reuse by certain individuals or groups without altering the license itself.

Creative Commons licenses will be explored in more detail in the next chapter. However, there are other open licenses that can be applied to educational materials. A few of these licenses are described below:

• GNU Free Documentation License: A copyleft license grants the right to copy, redistribute, and modify a resource, with the condition that all copies and derivative works must be made available under the same license. While copies can be sold commercially, the original document or source code must also be accessible to the user.^[5]
• Free Art License: The FAL "grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and modify creative works without infringing the author’s rights." It is intended for use with artistic works rather than documents.^[6]

Why Open Licenses?

Open licenses are fundamental to what qualifies an educational resource as an OER. The adaptability and reusability of OER ensure that they are not only free to access but also available for educators to modify for their courses. For instance, in the figure below, an openly licensed image has been traced to enhance readability for users.

“Adaptation in action” by Abbey Elder, licensed CC 0 1.0, was adapted from “Copyrighted source to tracing” by Kelvinsong, also licensed CC 0 1.0. This image was originally used to represent an improper recreation of a copyrighted work via tracing. In this example, it shows how an already open work can be legally recreated via tracing for readability.

Early in the open education movement, David Wiley introduced what became one of the foundational tenets of the field: the 5Rs^[8]. These five attributes lay out what it means for something to be truly “open”.

The 5 Rs include:

• Reuse – Use a resource in any context you choose.
• Remix – Combine multiple resources to create a new, integrated resource.
• Revise – Make a copy of a resource and modify it to suit the local context.
• Retain – Keep a copy of the resource and control it permanently.
• Redistribute – The right to share what you’ve created freely.

While the “redistribute” and “revise” rights are the most commonly exercised rights in open education, each of the five plays an important role in the utility of an open educational resource. For example, without the right to “remix” materials, an educator who teaches an interdisciplinary course would not be able to combine two disparate OER into a new resource that more closely fits their needs.

Collections of textbooks designed with open licenses and for reuse, remix, and redistribute within courses for free. An open textbook is an openly-licensed textbook offered online by its author(s). The open license sets open textbooks apart from traditional textbooks by allowing users to read online, download, or print the book at no additional cost.

Open textbooks, with their open licenses, provide a cost-effective and flexible alternative to traditional textbooks. By allowing free access, download, and printing, these resources support reuse and remixing, making quality educational content more accessible and adaptable.

These are repositories of open educational resources covering most of educational disciplines.  Open Repositories are websites which house open books, textbooks, lectures, tutorials, quiz/test, case studies, assessment tools, images, syllabi, simulations, online courses and other resources of educational value.