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Open Educational Resources (OER)

Stuart NicolEducational Design & EngagementLearning Teaching and Web Services DivisionINFORMATION SERVICESTwitter: @UoE_LTW

What is an Open Educational Resource?

What is an OER?An OER is a freely available and openly licensed digital resource.

“OER are 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”

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Some definitions: what do IPR, copyright, license & open license mean?

“Intellectual property rights (IPR) are the rights given to persons over the creations of their minds. They usually give the creator an exclusive right over the use of his/her creation for a certain period of time”*.

Copyright is an area of IPR that covers the rights of authors of creative works, the main purpose of which “is to encourage and reward creative work”*.

A license is the permission, or authorisation, to use a copyrighted work.

“A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work”**.

By applying a public, or open, license to a work, copyright holders give permission for others to copy or change their work in ways that would otherwise infringe copyright law (provided that the licensees obey the terms and conditions of the license).

* from the World Trade Organisation website.** from Wikipedia.

What is not an OER?Open Access and Open DataOpen Access refers to publications released under an open license (e.g. open access journals) and Open Data refers to data that is freely available to use and republish. The term OER specifically refers to materials for teaching & learning released under an open license: https://oerknowledgecloud.org/content/what-difference-between-oer-and-open-access-publishing

Materials without stated copyright or open reuse licenseMaterials available on the web without explicit copyright statement or open license shouldn’t be considered OERs. The absence of a copyright statement does not mean that the material is free to use or adapt. OERs should always display a license containing the terms of reuse.

Reusing OERs: don’t reinvent the wheel!Before creating new resources for your course (images, videos, tutorials, etc.), it might be worth checking to see whether there are existing, openly licensed, resources available on the internet that you can reuse.

Creative Commons search provides a useful ‘meta-search’ over a number of platforms (Google, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) http://search.creativecommons.org/

Searches specifically for resources shared under a Creative Commons license.

The Creative Commons Wiki provides some examples of good, average and incorrect attribution https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Best_practices_for_attribution

Good: "Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by tvol is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Average: Photo by tvol / CC BY

Incorrect: Photo: Creative Commons

Creative Commons recommends including details of the title, author, source and license of the work, including links to more information where possible.

If you do reuse, make sure you get the attribution right

If you create something new, consider sharing back into ‘commons’ using a Creative Commons license you are comfortable with

CC BY-ND does not allow the user to edit the work, but allows sharing of the work commercially and non-commercially, provided the credit the author of the original work.CC BY-NC lets others share, edit, and build upon your work non-commercially, provided they credit the author of the original work. CC BY-NC-SA allows the user to do all of the above, as long as they share their edited material under the same license agreement.CC BY-NC-ND the most restrictive type of license. Allows others to share your work as long as they credit the author, but does not allow for editing of the work or commercial use.

CC BY the least restrictive type of CC license. Lets others share, edit, and build upon your work, commercially or non commercially, as long as they credit the author of the original work.CC BY-SA allows the user to do all of the above, as long as they share their edited material under the same license agreement.

Cable Green, CC BY 4.0

How do I apply a license? Ensure that the material is your own work, or contains only openly licensed work

shared under the agreed terms (but remember you will need to abide by those terms). The copyright service will be able to help if you are unsure about copyright issues ([email protected])

Choose the most appropriate license for your material. The Creative Commons website license chooser is a useful tool for choosing & generating the license text and image: http://creativecommons.org/choose/. Some platforms allow you to choose and generate a license in the upload workflow (Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.).

University of Edinburgh should be stated as the licensor (well, for employees anyway) so that the resource can be correctly attributed: © The University of Edinburgh.

Where should I share my OER?There are several options for sharing your OER depending on subject area and target audience.

The University recommends depositing all materials in Jorum, as this is the primary repository for Further and Higher Education, but you are free to link to Jorum or create additional records anywhere you think is appropriate.

OER

Repository

JORUMMERLOT

Xpert

OERCommons

TESConnect

Social Media

Youtube

Flicker

iTunesU

Slideshare

SoundCloud

OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare

OpenLearn

TU Delft OCW