33 Open Educational Resources

Ms. Swasti Dhar

epgp books

 

Unit Structure:

 

32.1 Introduction to Open Educational Resources

 

32.2 What are Open Educational Resources?

 

32.3 History of OER

 

32.4 How does OER work?

 

32.5 Types of OER

 

32.6 Major Issues in OER – Licensing and Intellectual Property Rights

 

32.7 Ethics in using OER

 

32.8 Choosing the best OER (with reference to the OER Commons)

 

32.9 Using OER in Primary, Secondary & Higher Education

 

32.10 Sharing & Collaborating Educational Resources

 

32.11 Creating own Educational Resources

 

32.12 Advantages of using OERs

 

·       Teachers

 

·       Learners

 

·       Institutions

 

32.13 Challenges in using OERs

 

32.14 Summary

 

Learning Outcomes

 

After completing this module, students will be able to:

  • State the concept of Open Educational Resources (OERs)
  • Describe the history of OERs
  • Explain the copyright and the issue of licensing of Intellectual Property Rights while using an OER
  • Reflect upon the ethics in using an OER
  • Decide the best way to use OERs
  • Elaborate on the advantages and disadvantages of using OERs

 

32.1 Introduction to OERs

 

Gone are the days when a student or a teacher would trudge to the library in order to browse through books and get their information and facts or when access to a good library; be it the British Library, the American Library or the Asiatic Society, was something to be proud of. Knowledge, today, is just a click away. Whether one wants to look up the meaning of a word or its usage, one just has to log on to the internet and viola, it is there!

 

This phenomenon of accessing information online has become a boon for in the education field with the availability of various online resources which a teacher or a student can use.

 

32.2 What are Open Educational Resources?

 

The idea of open educational resources (OER) has numerous working definitions. Often cited is the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation definition which defines 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 and re-purposing by others.”

 

Open educational resources include

 

  • full courses,
  • course materials,
  • modules,
  • textbooks,
  • streaming videos,
  •  tests,
  • software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge”.1

 

The Organization 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. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licences.”

 

On the other hand, the Commonwealth of Learning has adopted the widest definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) as

 

1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources ‘materials offered freely and openly to use and adapt for teaching, learning, development and research.’

 

And the WikiEducator project suggests that OER refers

 

“to educational resources (lesson plans, quizzes, syllabi, instructional modules, simulations, etc.) that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing’.

 

If we analyze the above definitions, we realize that OER comprises all conceivable digitized and non-digitized resources that are available freely in the public domain and help in the process of teaching, learning and research. They may be simple lesson plans, you tube videos, online explanations and even full-fledged courses.Thus from the freely available dictionary to MOOC’ s free University courses, all come under the purview of OERs.

 

 

32.3 History of OER

 

A large part of the early work in OERs was funded by government institutions and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundations. Between 2002 to 2010, the foundation donated more than $ 14 million to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop the MIT Open Courseware.

 

Believing that OERs can widen access to quality education, particularly when shared by many countries and higher education institutions, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) champions OERs as a means of promoting access, equity and quality in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

 

In 2003, the ownership of Wikipedia and Wiktionary projects was transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization whose goal is to collecting and developing free educational content and to disseminate it effectively and globally. Wikipedia ranks in the top-ten most visited websites worldwide since 2007.

 

The Open Courseware Consortium, founded in 2005 to extend the reach and impact of open course materials and foster new open course materials, counted more than 200 member institutions from around the world in 2009.

 

OER Commons was founded in 2007 by Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), which is a nonprofit education research institute dealing in innovation in open education content and practices, as a way to develop, share, and promote open educational resources to educators, administrators, parents, and students.

 

OER Commons also provides educators with tools to align OER to the Common Core State Standards so that they may evaluate the quality of OER to OER Rubricsand to contribute and share OERs with other teachers and students worldwide.

 

To further promote the sharing of these resources among educators, in 2008 ISKME launched the OER Commons Teacher Training Initiative, which focuses on advancing open educational practices and on building opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning.

 

WikiEducator was launched in August 2006 to provide a forum for planning education projects built on OER, creating and promoting open education resources (OERs), and networking towards funding proposals. Its WikiEducator’s Learning4Content project builds skills in the use of MediaWiki and related free software technologies for mass-collaboration in the authoring of free content and claims to be the world’s largest wiki training project for education. By June 2009 the project had facilitated 86 workshops training 3,001 educators from 113 different countries.

 

32.4 How does OER work?

 

Since the material that we can use under OER is all free, one uses it simply by acknowledging the work by attributing it to the original author so that the world knows that you respect the knowledge of others. One needs to just acknowledge the author. Other than that, one is welcome to reuse the content, change it, and translate it so that it meets one’s needs.

 

This boils down to the motto of ‘Don’t just take. Share your work, too.’ OERsbelieve in collaborations and thus expect students and teachers to login and not only use one’s work but also share the one’s own knowledge with others.

 

32.5 Types of OER

 

Today knowledge is available to us at the click of a mouse. Information is getting digitized and almost every bit of knowledge is available on the internet. Students and teacher alike use these resources for educational purposes. Broadly, the OERs can be divided into the following categories:

  • Resources that help in learning the content:These include textbooks, dictionaries, videos and podcasts which explain the content etc.
  • Resources that help in evaluating the content: These include quizzes and tests which can be taken online, sample tests, etc
  • Resources that help in planning: These include planners and rubrics, applications etc
  • Resources that help in educational development: This, perhaps, is the most important role of OERs which can be used by all to develop any topic in depth.

 

32.6 Major Issues in OER – Licensing and Intellectual Property Rights

 

Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) – the key multilateral institution that governs such rights, in conjunction with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – defines the term as meaning:

 

“the legal rights which result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields.”

 

In practical terms, intellectual property rights confer a temporary, fixed-term monopoly on the exploitation, use and proliferation of a particular creation, in exchange for which commercialisation of the creation is mandated or implied.

 

The arrival and rapid growth of the Internet and other important communication technologies took the copyright system unawares. Up until the 1990s, the copyright system was designed for a world which communicated in certain predictable ways – on paper, on television, and on established radio frequencies. Digital media created an unprecedented problem.

 

From a developmental perspective, the relatively cheap and interactive possibilities offered by the Internet were, and are, seen as opportunities. The copyright system is well cognizant of such opportunities too, but it also recognises a threat.

 

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are characterised by the fact that their copyright scope is limited by means of an open content license. The “all rights reserved” model of traditional copyright is replaced with a more generous “some rights reserved”. What does this mean exactly? In the schooling context, an open content license enables the recipient of an educational work to freely use, distribute (and in some cases modify) the material.

 

In the context of schooling, OERs apply mainly to educational textbooks and other extra-curricular resources. To grow this body of work implies not only that more resources are freely available to educators, but also that more educators (and schools) can participate in the production of such resources. Thus, not only does the body of knowledge grow with OERs, but so does the number of knowledge creators.

 

Some of the ways these restrictions are kept is by “locking” a device so that one cannot easily download or copy it. This is generally done to protect the authenticity of the content such as text books or resource materials. Foe most cases, OERs allow free usage of the material provided along with a line for the credit to the author.

 

The best way that a teacher can use OERs is through the OER Commons site which is a library of all open educational resources for free use or reuse.

 

32.7 Ethics in using OER

 

Can consent of use of resource be presumed when one is using an OER or are there any ethical issues which need to be decided and adhered to if one uses OERs. The best way to check whether the OER is actually ‘open’ is to check for any citations to be made. Most knowledge builders expect to be cited for their work. Even if the resource has been reworked or changed, it is always better to cite the original.

 

The main guidelines for ethics have been given by the British Educational Research Association (BERA) and the principles behind it are:

  • Informed consent
  • Respect for persons
  • Minimizing Harm

 

32.8 Choosing the best OER

 

Most people start finding an OER with the help of a Google search. Most educators are simply looking for some information or details. A better way to search for open resources is to the use specific gateways such as the OER Commons (www.oercommons.org) or the Open Professional Educational Network (OPEN) platform at (www.open4us.org)

 

The Find OER button or the general search button can be used to direct one’s search to the following:

  • Video search
  • Image Search
  • Audio/ Music Search
  • General Search

 

One can also specify the search in terms of:

  • Animations and simulation search General Educational Search
  • Open textbooks
  • Recorded Lectures
  • Modular Course component search
  • Complete course search

 

Thus using forums such as OER commons or OPEN helps to get the most authentic and best pen resource available in a uniform directed manner.

 

32.9 Using OER in Primary, Secondary & Higher Education

 

Mainly aimed at higher education, India’s National Knowledge Commission (NKC) decided, in December 2005, to explore opportunities with open education materials in order to understand the implications for extending access and enhancing quality for higher education in India. Following are some of the initiatives in OER in India.

 

National Repository of Open Educational Resources (www.nroer.in)

 

In August, 2013, India launched a new learning repository for open educational resources (OER). The

  • Department of School Education and Literacy,
  • Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, and the
  • Central Institute of Educational Technology, National Council of Educational Research and Training have collaboratively developed the National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER)which is a storehouse of OER for the primary, secondary and higher secondary education in India.

 

The resources available here are licensed under the creative commons and can be used and adapted freely with a reasonable amount of citations and linkages indicating where it is from.

 

One can also add to the knowledge and become a knowledge creator.

 

I-Consent (www.mkcl.org/iconsent)

 

A group of more than 20 educational institutions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the government has come together to form the Indian Consortium for Educational Transformation (I-CONSENT) which is working to increase access to quality education through eLearning.

 

I-CONSENT is currently leading four initiatives:

  • Virtual School and Learning Homes: a pilot programme in Maharashtra State that offers education to out-of-school children through open and distance learning.
  • Open Educational Resources: learning materials that are freely available online for educators.
  • Nurturing Excellence and Talent Services (NETS): a training programme that teaches teachers to use various tools and techniques to identify and nurture talent in students.
  • eTeacher Training: an audio programme with learner support that provides teachers with knowledge and skills in information and communications technologies, open and distance learning and the development and use of open educational resources.

 

National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (www.nptel.iitk.ac.in)

 

This is a joint venture by seven of the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and funded by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the NPTEL is a trial programme which helps provide free engineering education.At present the program has 120 web based courses and 115 video courses in the core sciences, computer science, civil engineering, electrical engineering, electronics and material engineering. The NPTEL also provides an opportunity for teachers and students from rural areas to learn from these high quality lectures and improve the quality of teaching in these rural colleges.

 

Ekalavya project (http://ekalavya.it.iitb.ac.in)

 

The Ekalavya project has been launched by IIT, Bombay. Aimed at teaching high quality engineering concepts, in this project, the content is developed in various Indian languages and is distributed through the internet. This project has also developed an Open Source Educational Resources Animation Repository (OSCAR) and provides web-based interactive animations for teaching various concepts and technologies. OSCAR provides a platform for mentors/professors to suggest ideas for animation and for developers/students to create content based on the suggested ideas and guidance. Funding for the Ekalavya and OSCAR project comes mainly from private industry.

 

E-grid

 

E-Grid develops and maintains pedagogically sound and refereed Educational Resources in identified subjects. Subject specific portals are developed and these portals are governed by subject experts within the program. This project is supported by the Human Resource ministry at IIIT, Kerala. Currently, this program also offers open Educational Resources only in the sciences and engineering sciences.

 

32.10 Sharing & Collaborating Educational Resources

 

Using OERs is a great way to learn from the vast repository of that is already available. OERs helps in collaborative learning by:

  • Providing greater collaboration:
  • within subject disciplines
  • across discipline boundaries
  • between educational institutions and employers
  • between educational institutions and other organisations

 

More opportunity for teachers to:

  • engage in reflective practice
  • get feedback
  • get ideas from others

 

Some of the major sites where teachers can collaborate and share are:

  • WikiEducator- an evolving community involved with collaborative OER projects
  • UKOER Phase 2 Final Report: cultural considerations
  • STEM OER: guidance on open educational resources in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths

 

32.11 Creating own Educational Resources

 

In planning one’s learning resource, one needs to keep four questions in mind.

 

  1. What are my Objectives? The teacher must have clear cut objectives in mind. Only then will he/she be able to create a great educational resource.
  2. What activities do I wish to engage my learners with? Activities which are planned need to be age and content appropriate. The age and maturity level of the learners must be kept in mind so that effective resources are created.
  3. How will I evaluate the effectiveness of what I have produced? This relates to how you will assess and evaluate what has been taught. When we meet our learners face-to-face, the learner’s body language gives plenty of feedback regarding the success of a teaching method. In producing OERs you don’t have such quick feedback.
  4. In the light of the evaluation, how will I change 1 and 2 above?

 

OERs follow the OER Commons which ensures that the OER is of a good quality. The best way to create own OERs is to become a member and then opt to create and share.

 

 

32.12 Advantages of using OERs

 

Undoubtedly, using OERs are of a great use to all, the teacher or the learner. Given below are some of the advantages of using OERs to the institution providing the OER, the teacher as well as the learner.

 

Teachers:

  • Inspiration and ideas for different ways of teaching
  • A wider pool of resources to draw on
  • Fills gaps in the teachers expertise or media production skills eg video for production
  • Allows for feedback from peers and learners and for comparing work with others
  • More opportunities to collaborate with others across institutions, sectors and subject disciplines
  • Greater awareness of open educational practices and intellectual property issues
  • More learners can be reached

 

Learner:

 

A clearer idea of what it’s like to study within a particular institution, subject area or course prior to application

  • Free-of-charge access to a wide range of educational resources worldwide
  • Access to supplementary resources to support study skills
  • The ability to benefit from varied perspectives on, and approaches to, a single subject
  • A curriculum which is integrated into real life experience
  • Resources can be accessed in a variety of settings – useful for non-traditional and work-based learners
  •   Free access to educational resources without being required to enrol in an institution

 

Institution:

  • Marketing and reputation building through showcasing the work of the institution
  • Extending the institution’s reach internationally
  • Social responsibility in line with the academic traditions of sharing knowledge
  • More opportunities to collaborate within and beyond the institution
  • Preserving knowledge in disciplines where resources are not widely available
  • Improved intellectual property management
  • New opportunities for staff development

 

32.13Challenges in using OERs

 

OERs have become the lifeline in the teaching profession. Yet one must guard againt some of the following challenges that OERs face and use it judiciously. The main challenges that an OER faces today are:

  • Quality issues: Since many OER repositories allow any user to create an account and post material, some resources may not be relevant and/or accurate.
  • Lack of human interaction between teachers and students: OER material is created to stand alone, and since self-learning users may access the material outside of a classroom environment, they will miss out on the discussion and instructor feedback that characterize for-credit classes and that make such classes useful and valuable.
  • Language and/or cultural barriers: Although efforts are being made to make OERs available in multiple languages, many are only available in English, limiting their usefulness to non-English speakers. Additionally, not all resources are culturally appropriate for all audiences.
  • Technological issues: Some students may have trouble using some OERs if they have a slow or erratic internet connection. Other OERs may require software that students don’t have and that they may not be able to afford.
  • Intellectual property/copyright concerns: Since OERs are meant to be shared openly, the “fair use” exemption from the U.S. Copyright Act ceases to apply; all content put online must be checked to ensure that it doesn’t violate copyright law.
  • Sustainability issues:Since OER creators generally do not receive any type of payment for their OER, there may be little incentive for them to update their OER or to ensure that it will continue to be available online.

 

you can view video on Open Educational Resources

32.14 Summary

 

REFERENCES/ LEARN MORE

  1. Okada. A; Collaborative Learning 2.0: Open Educational Resources; 2013, IGI Global Publishing, Newark, USA