What Are OER?

WHAT ARE OER?Day 1 Session 2

OER?A] What are Open Educational Resources? - Definitions

1] 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 or 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. (ref: Atkins)

2] The open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for ‘non-commercial’ purposes. (ref: UNESCO)

3] Open Educational Resources are digitized materials offered freelyand openly for educators, students and self learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research. (ref: Wikipedia)

OER REPOSITORIES - OCW

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

The flagship of the Hewlett Foundation OER investments is the MIT OpenCourseWare Project. This project emerged from MIT faculty and administrators who asked themselves the following question:

“How is the Internet going to be used in education and what is our university going to do about it?” The answer from the MIT faculty was this: “Use it to provide free access to the primary materials for virtually all our courses. We are going to make our educational material available to students, faculty, and other learners, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.”

OER REPOSITORIES - USU

http://ocw.usu.edu/English

Utah State University has been a major grantee in the OER program as a provider of open content and as a free source of open learning support through the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL).

The Center provides support to others interested in starting OCW at their institutions. It has developed eduCommons, an OCW management system with workflow process that guides users in publishing materials in an openly accessible format.

OER REPOSITORIES -OPENLEARN

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials.

FAQ: Can I use your materials to teach my class?

Educators are encouraged to use OpenLearn materials in the classroom.

FAQ: Can I link to OpenLearn from my website?

Links to OpenLearn or pages within the website are permitted as long as the use of the materials associated with the link is permitted under the terms of the Creative Commons licence

OER REPOSITORIES -CONNEXIONS

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

Connexions is a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.

Anyone may view or contribute: authors create and collaborate, instructors rapidly build and share custom collections while learners find and explore content

SEARCH & FIND# OER Repository URL1 MIT Open Courseware http://ocw.mit.edu

2 Utah State University http://ocw.usu.edu/

3 OpenLearn (Open University - UK) http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php

4 Connexions (Rice University) http://cnx.org/

5 MERLOT (All Licences, not only CC) http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm

6 OER Commons http://www.oercommons.org/

7 Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) http://www.doaj.org/

8 United Nations University (UNU) http://ocw.unu.edu/

9 Open Learning Initiative (Carnegie Melon) http://www.cmu.edu/oli/index.shtml

10 Yale University http://oyc.yale.edu/

11 webcast.berkeley (Podcasts and Webcasts) http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

12 University of Malawi (?) ?

POTENTIAL FOR OER IN HE AFRICA

Dearth of quality resources in African HE Existing resources often lack African context. Existing copyright / licensing models

exorbitant Makes sense to create, share and adapt our

own resources Makes sense to adapt Western materials

CHALLENGES FOR OER IN HE AFRICA

OER culture not established Academics cling to ‘intellectual capital’ in

hope it might become revenue stream Repositories not comprehensive across all

subjects Bit of skill required in remixing materials Not clear what resources are actually being

used for.

LICENSING OPTIONS / COPYRIGHTCreative Commons, with a tagline of share, reuse, and remix, legally, is a critical infrastructure service for the OER movement providing free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. They can change the default copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”

Creative Commons is a companion to the OER initiative and was founded in 2001 to help revive the shrinking public domain as copyright durations were repeatedly extended in large part due to the pressures from the media industry. Like the free software and open-source movements, their ends are cooperative and community-minded, but the means are voluntary and libertarian.

A Spectrum of Rights…How it Works…

Additional Information…

http://creativecommons.org/

Ref: Atkins et al. (2007)

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 1

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 2

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 3

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 4

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 5

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 6

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 7

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 8

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 9

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 10

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 11

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 12

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 13

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 14

CC – SPECTRUM OF RIGHTS 15

IMPLICATIONS FOR UM

How do we determine success of UM OER project?

What will UM do with materials after manipulation / use?

What extent is the OER process repeatable / sustainable?

IADP / OER AFRICA

http://www.oerafrica.org/sadciadp

IADP / OER AFRICA ON FACEBOOK