Open Educational Resources — The Future of Knowledge Discovery
Create, Write, Provide Your Own
The internet has been disrupting the education sector since its advent and continues to do so.
From The Open University to Massive Online Open Courses (known affectionately as MOOCs) and now Open Educational Resources (OER), the world wide web has been empowering teachers and students alike for many years.
In the midst of a global pandemic, the teaching profession has had to adapt, shifting near-seamlessly to “Remote Teaching” and/or “Hybrid Teaching”. Educators had and still have to learn the lessons such as how to build a community in the virtual classroom and how to create new teaching material that meets student’s learning needs.
Open Educational Resources are another useful tool in the armoury of teachers and students alike.
What is an OER?
Open Educational Resources are exactly what they sound like, typically taking the form of higher education textbooks that are freely available to use on the internet. The basic idea behind “open” is: they are openly licensed, meaning they reside in the public domain or the copyright holder has abridged rights to eliminate barriers, so that anyone can use, reuse, share, revise, remix and redistribute them. They are freely available and free of charge.
Whilst it might seem daunting to be tasked with creating one of these, there are various initiatives such as the Rebus Community guide that have made it as easy as possible to plan, create and publish OERs for the benefits of students (and, themselves too).
Textbooks are the example used here, but an OER could take any form in any medium, and simply means something that is of educational value for others! This ever-increasing body of material often contains a creative commons license which is one of the various public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution OER.
What are OER useful for?
Open Educational Resources help to improve student learning and increase access to teaching and learning resources. They can lead to more personalized learning experiences for learners. Furthermore, OER give faculty the ability to customise courses material, textbooks, graphics, audio and video files, or any other material, instead of being bound to a traditional one-fits-all model.
Why create an OER?
Well, why not?
If you know that as an educator you could be doing more to help students around the world by creating an easily-accessible and valuable resource, you should go ahead and do it. Leading educational institutions know, creating an open resource that can be used, adapted and enjoyed is a key part of the so-called “Educational Leadership”. It is rewarding for content, marketing and branding. Whilst you cannot profit directly from authoring such resources, this is an opportunity to join a global community of like-minded educational professionals who want to help students meet their educational goals.
Similarly, your OER will not just help your students, but could provide vital guidance and direction to yourself and other instructors and educators who can then benefit from the details of your thoughts in a meaningful blueprint of narrative.
How my journey to OER began?
Facing the pandemic in the summer 2020, I started to create my first open textbook project with Pressbooks.com for the course “Basics of Social Work Management” at the Dresden University of Applied Sciences in the Bachelor’s degree programme “Social Pedagogy and Management”. In this course, students learn how to apply economic fundamentals to the management of social work organisations.
I created this OER textbook as an effort to intensify cooperation and dialogue between students, lecturers, researchers and practitioners from the social welfare and health care sector as well as related disciplines and professions. This OER textbook has become a knowledge base that is to be continuously expanded, discussed and further developed. And I also involved some of my students to participate in the preparation of the material, e.g. for proofreading and review.
The material for this digital textbook came from transcriptions of prerecorded e-lectures. Due to copyright restrictions of some material from other sources, I had to create new figures, diagrams and tables which have become useful material for future lectures. As you can see, if you start working on OER, not only your students will benefit. It will enrich both your collection of content and your knowledge in the field.
Now it is up to you. It’s very easy to learn creating an OER.
How can you get started creating an OER?
We appreciate that creating an open educational resource sounds extremely easy, and like anything worth doing, it isn’t. Thankfully, there are other educators further along in their journey than us that have laid the foundations we can pick up and add to help those who are just starting out.
The University of Pittsburgh has created a vast and powerful guide to authoring OERs that you can find here. It includes:
- Guides on the process
- Tools for publishing
- Information on rights
- Case studies
and a lot more.
Similarly, Suny Empire State College goes even further, providing useful advice on where you should publish your OER once you’ve authored it, so that as many people can enjoy it as possible.
Congratulations on becoming a more effective educator!
