Despite rising faculty awareness of open educational resources, the #1 barrier to greater OER adoption is that 50% of faculty say it is “too hard to find what I need” when searching for content.
Source: Babson Survey Research Group’s “Opening the Textbook: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2017“
The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
A growing network of higher education institutions and systems are supporting the library and the adoption of open textbooks as members of the Open Textbook Network.
The library currently boasts over 700 open textbooks with reviews from over 1,200 faculty across the country.
Objectives:
Creative Commons is divided into global chapters; the poster below was created by Creative Commons Poland. It break downs the various shorthands used in Creative Commons licenses.
Study each and familiarize yourself not only with what each set of letters stands for, but what actions the copyright holder is allowing you to do with that license. Specifically, think: how would this affect the way I teach?
Note: Most people consider BY-ND and BY-NC-ND licenses not OER. Why? Because an ND “no derivatives” license does not allow you to participate in 5R activities. For the purposes of this course and the assignments below, however, it is acceptable to include resources with ND licenses.
This distinction also leads to another point of clarification. Creative Commons is not synonymous with OER. Rather, Creative Commons licenses (most of them at least) facilitate the creation and propagation of OER.
Now that we know what Creative Commons is, how it relates to OER, and can define the various license types, let’s explore how to apply that knowledge. The first step: when looking at a webpage or other piece of content, how do you know if it has a Creative Commons license?
The video below details the common areas of a webpage where Creative Commons logos are located.
We’re glad you asked!
The answer is no. Creative Commons is the open license that popularized open educational resources, which has caused the two terms to be used synonymously by some. But this is misleading because a resource can be OER without carrying a Creative Commons license. And as we learned above, not all Creative Commons licenses are considered “open.” (Do you remember which license most people consider to not be OER?)
Generally speaking, OER can come in 3 other forms:
GNU is an organization sponsored by the Free Software Academy; GNU has produced a number of licenses relating to software. Some web material you may come across make use of the following:
Content in the public domain means there is no copyright holder, making anyone free to reuse or remix for their purposes. Copyright has expired for all works published in the United States before 1923. In other words, if the work was published in the U.S. before January 1, 1923, you are free to use it in the U.S. without permission. This rule applies regardless of whether the work was created by an individual author, a group of authors, or an employee (a work made for hire). Because of legislation passed in 1998, no new works will fall into the public domain until 2019, when works published in 1923 will expire. In 2020, works published in 1924 will expire, and so on.
But there is another way a work can be in the public domain in addition to the Year-End Expiration of Copyright Terms rule. Original works can be deliberately placed it in the public domain — this is known as “dedication.” If, upon viewing a work, you see words such as, “This work is dedicated to the public domain,” then it is free for you to use. Sometimes an author deliberately chooses not to protect a work and dedicates the work to the public. This type of dedication is rare, and unless there is express authorization placing the work in the public domain, do not assume that the work is free to use.
An additional concern is whether the person making the dedication has the right to do so. Only the copyright owner can dedicate a work to the public domain. Sometimes, the creator of the work is not the copyright owner and does not have authority. If in doubt, contact the copyright owner to verify the dedication.
Generally speaking, anything found on a .gov website is free to use. Technically, the reason government-produced content is free to use is because they are in the public domain, making this more of an extension to the discussion we just had on public domain content, but many people tend to think of government-produced content differently from works produced by everyday citizens. Examples of good government-produced OER are the National Institute of Health’s Toxicology Tutor and NASA’s Historical Studies in the Societal Impact of Spaceflight textbook.
Objective:
If you’ll recall the goal for this training, we’re interested in helping faculty interested in incorporating open educational resources (OER) into their class locate appropriate OER for their subject area of expertise.
“For their subject area of expertise” implies some form of evaluation. While we won’t go into a complete resource vetting process, we do need to ensure that materials we find are relevant for us and our students. This starts with identifying what we currently teach.
A list of keywords based on the topics, content, and learning outcomes we currently teach will help guide our search for replacement OER content that is free of restrictive copyright.
Listen to this brief clip explaining the importance of searching for OER by learning outcomes (or you can watch the full video here):
Objective:
With your keywords in hand, and a solid baseline of Creative Commons and open licenses, lets put you to the test to find OER! Up first: The Open Textbook Library.
This is common question from faculty. We get it — you get what you pay for, right? Let us explain how the Open Textbook Library, and open educational resources in general, prove that this is not the case.
Objectives:
Textbooks are not the only form of educational content. While the Open Textbook Library is a great start, what about videos, journal articles, or quiz questions? That’s where the Creative Commons search engine comes in.
The Creative Commons search engine is found at search.creativecommons.org. The video below explains how to use it, and how to apply the appropriate filters to refine your search even more.
My name is David Rose, and I created OER101 as part of my Master’s program in Learning Design and Technology from Purdue University.
I am currently the Faculty Innovation Technologist at American University’s Center for Teaching Research & Learning (CTRL), an OER Research Fellow for the Open Education Group, as well as a student in Purdue University’s online Master of Science in Education in Learning Design & Technology program.
Before joining AU, I was freelance writer traveling the world for 2 years. Before that, I worked for the Saylor Academy, an education nonprofit designing free online courses built around open educational resources. While there, I created hundreds of course resources guides to help educators design OER-based courses, and developed a completely open course with NASA engineers and Nobel Laureate physicists.
The bulk of my work at CTRL centers around online learning and how OER facilitates pedagogical freedom and student performance. I also co-manage AU’s free WordPress installation, EdSpace, and help faculty use WordPress for a range of educational purposes from student blogs to whole course sites.
Check out my website to learn more!
Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.