1. Open Education
Resources
A Presentation by Quentin Vieregge
University of Wisconsin-Barron County
Thursdays at the U
March 29th, 2012
2. How much does . . .
• it cost to gain access to the curriculum at
MIT for a semester?
• it cost to buy (or rent) a English textbook or
handbook on rhetoric (such as the Bedford
or They Say / I Say)?
• it cost to assemble the work of thousands of
teacher-scholars?
7. Agenda
• Define and Characterize OERs
• General Examples of OERs
• Writing Examples of OERs
• Introducing Writing Commons
• Ideas for how it could be used at UWBC
8. What are Open
Education Resources ?
• “Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching,
learning, and research resources that reside in the
public domain or have been released under an
intellectual property license that permits sharing,
accessing, repurposing —including for
commercial purposes —and collaborating with
others” (Hal Plotkin, “Free to Learn” 1).
9. What are Open
Education Resources ?
• “Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching
and learning materials that you may freely use and
reuse, without charge. Open Educational
Resources are different from other resources a
teacher may use in that OER have been given
limited or unrestricted licensing rights. That means
they have been authored or created by an individual
or organization that chooses to retain few, if any,
ownership rights” (OER Commons.org, “About”).
10. What can I do with
OER resources?
• “For some of these resources, that means you can
download the resource and share it with colleagues
and students. For others, it may be that you can
download a resource, edit it in some way, and then
re-post it as a remixed work. OER often have a
Creative Commons or GNU license that state
specifically how the material may be used, reused,
adapted, and shared” (OER Commons.org,
“About”).
11. Characteristics of
OERs
• Free OERs
• Authoritative or Peer-
Reviewed
• Reusable
• Revisable
image courtesy of creative commons.org
• Under a Creative
Commons License
12. What Can I Do With A Creative
Commons License?
Can Edit, Remix, Sell, Distribute, But Can Share, But Only With Citation and No Changes or
With Citation Commerical Use
Can Edit, Remix, Distribute With Exact Same Can Edit, Remix, Sell, Distribute, But With Citation and
License and No Commercial Use Without Commercial Use
images and information courtesy of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
15. How Can I Use MIT OCW?
What type of creative commons license?
image and information courtesy of http://ocw.mit.edu
(BY-NC-SA)
Can use, edit, remix, and distribute non-commercially, with
attribution, and the same license.
16. “The primary goal of the Community College Consortium for
Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is to create
awareness of OER and help colleges to identify, create
and/or repurpose existing OER to improve teaching and
learning and make education more accessible for all
learners. We are seeking the support of faculty to identify,
review, evaluate, and make available high quality, accessible
and culturally open educational resources” (Community
College Consortium, “About”)
http://oerconsortium.org/
18. Peer Production Technologies
“But OER are not just free learning materials and resources. OER is also the
underlying open, creative, collaborative process itself, one that enables continuous
rapid improvements in the quality of both teaching and learning” (Hal Plotkin, “Free
to Learn”).
22. So what would be an example
of courseware that is not OER?
Harvard Law’s Course “
Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do
23. Welcome to
Writing
Commons
“Writing Commons aspires to be a
community for writers, a creative
learning space for students in
courses that require college-level
writing, a creative, interactive
space for teachers to share
resources and pedagogy”
(Writing Commons, “Home”).
24. Welcome to
Writing
Commons
“Our primary goal is to provide the
resources and community students need
to improve their writing, particularly
students enrolled in courses that require
college-level writing. As mentioned in '
About Us', we believe learning materials
should be free for all students and
teachers–part of the cultural commons”
(Writing Commons, “Home”).
27. The assumption is that if we all teach
our courses conscientiously, each of us
making sure our demands are as clear
Connecting the Dots and transparent as possible, our
students will make coherent sense of
our diverse perspectives and will
eventually be socialized into our
intellectual community. The problem
is that, no matter how transparent
each course is, as long as we know
little about our colleagues’ courses
our students figure to come away
with confusingly mixed messages
that will be hard to make sense of
without more help than we are
providing.” (Gerald Graff, “It’s Time
to End Courseocentrism” Inside
Higher Ed)
28. “On the cultural side, OER have
not been a part of pre-existing
educational practices within the
Gift Culture often tradition-bound higher
education enterprise; on occasion,
the reliance on sound, proven and
reliable past practices can
sometimes make it difficult for
promising new teaching methods
to gain momentum [ . . . ] The
brightest and most dazzling
teachers can light up a classroom
but, unpreserved, that
illumination is then usually lost
forever, except in the minds and
memories of a few fortunate
student witnesses” (Hal Plotkin,
“Free to Learn”)
29. Showing Off What We Can Do At UWBC
“Another benefit of opening up
course materials comes when
more people around the world
see the quality of the academic
culture on that campus. They can
only join that campus culture by
applying for admission to the
college or university. This
openness raises the general
awareness of the institution’s
academic offerings and stature
around the world” -- Sally M.
Johnstone, Educause
30. • We could provide supplemental readings in
the back of the syllabus.
• We could use OER print-on-demand when
textbook fees are low (similar to
Flatworld).
• We could create a student peer-reviewed
journal similar to The Red Cedar but with
academic papers.
