Introduction to Open Educational Rersources (OER)

Editor's Notes

• #2: Morning everyone and welcome to an introduction to open educational resourcesIntroduce myselfJisc RSC Scotland our main remit is to develop, advocate for and support the use of technology within learning and teaching
• #4: my slot this morning I’m going to Give you a quick introduction to OERWe’re going to look at some of the benefits of using OER in teaching and learningWe’ll take a look at some of the resrouces and repositories you can use to help you find OERs and the potential these have in aiding the management of OERsWell cover a little bit about open licences and how you can attribute your OERs and determine how they can be usedwell have a look at some of the tools you can use for creating your own OERs
• #8: over the last 10 years or so the trend for open has become ever more prevalentOER is but one activity in a huge amount of what has been termed as open educational practice or OEP Open Educational Practices (OEP) have been defined in various ways. Although, there is no one definition, they may be summarised as follows: Open Educational Practices can be described are teaching techniques that draw upon open technologies and high-quality Open Educational Resources (OER) in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning.[1][2]Other open movements are Open source, so coders and programmers are a huge community that are probably the best example of reusing and sharing their work to create and develop new services and technologies with other likeminded peopleOpen data,the ability of organisations to make datasets available on many different topics to be mashed up with other sets of data to create new services , data.gov.uk is the governments answer to releasing public data in one searchable website to enable other to create data mashups and create new services and bring together information in different ways has some examples such as Open access publishing… the hot topic in the information sector right now the practice of providing unrestricted access to peer reviewed scholarly research green and gold open access being the two main offersGreen open access[7][8] authors publish in any journal and self-archive a version of the article for gratis public use in their institutional repository,[9] in a central repository (such as PubMed Central), or on some other open access website.[10] Open access journals[11] provide immediate open access to all of their articles on the publisher's website.[10]Hybrid open access journals provide Gold open access only for those individual articles for which their authors (or their author's institution or funder) pay an open access publishing feeOpen courseware – services such as khan academy, MIT courseware are good examples of this, MIT made their course materials and structure open to everyone, over 200 courses that have had, to date, 125 million visitorsWe can take part in massive open online courses, or MOOCs as they’re commonly known and be part of a possible student body of thousandsThe movement of open is here to stay in whatever guise it may take in the future and OER is part of that
• #9: In practical terms of what is an open educational resource its worth thinking about it in a granular contextSo digital assets normally a single file (e.g. an image, video or audio clip), sometimes called a ‘raw media asset’;Information objects - a structured aggregation of digital assets, designed purely to present information; powerpoint presentationLearning objects- an aggregation of one or more digital assets which represents an educationally meaningful stand alone unit;Learning activities tasks involving interactions with information to attain a specific learning outcome;Learning design - – structured sequences of information and activities to promote learning.What makes any of these resources from a small audio clip to learning design packages truly OER is their ability to be reused and adapted for whatever local purpose is required.
• #10: FindableClearly describedClearly licensedFrom a trusted sourceEasily adapted, not reliant on other resources (technically and organisationally, free standing unwrappable)Free of copyrighted contentCrowd recommended?No need to be perfect!
• #11: David Wiley  believes that there’s a process or workflow in OER development follows a life cycle like this: Get: Searching and finding OERs. Getting OERs may include using search engines, repositories and finding individual websites. Create: Generate the OER, preferably using open source tools. Localise: Essentially, localising means making a resource more useful to a particular situation. For example, translating instruction from one language to another. Remix: Remixing is the act of taking two OER materials and merging them to form a new OER. Remixing is probably one of the most enjoyable parts of OER production. Licensing: License the work using an open content licences such as Creative Commons and GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License). Use: This covers the actual use of OER for your context. Redistribute: Publishing an OER once it is finished and making it available for the open education community to begin the life cycle again.
• #12: Apart from the obvious economic benefits of utilising OER , OER can also help meet strategic needs, especially:Can improves student satisfaction in that it enhancing marketing and engagement of prospective students worldwide and also your current students have further resources they can use in their study and actually remix and release themselvesengagement with a wider communityengagement with employers by releasing your resources they can find and use within their own organisationssustaining vulnerable subjectsbrokering collaborations and partnerships
• #13: Benefits Part of the Jisc and HEAUKOER programme looked at providing evidence of benefits across a range of educational contexts and for a diverse mix of stakeholders across several sectors: Learners can benefit from:enhanced quality and flexibility of resources freedom of access (e.g. at work/home/on placement) support for self-directed, peer-to-peer and social/informal learning approaches the opportunity to test out course materials before enrolling – and compare with other similar courses authentic or 'real-life' learning experiences through OER that link to employer or professional sector activities  The OER originator can benefit from:student/user feedback and open peer review reputational benefits, recognition & reaching a wider range of learners benefits (efficiency and cultural) of collaborative approaches to teaching/learning opportunities to work across sectors, institutions and subject disciplinesincreased digital literacies (particularly around IPR) Educational Institutions can benefit from:recognition and enhanced reputation wider availability of their academic content and focus on the learning experience (linking to widening participation agenda)increased capacity to support remote studentsefficiencies in content production (particularly around generic content that can be used across subject areas)new partnerships/linkages with other institutions and organisations outside the education sectorincreased sharing of ideas and practice within the institution, including greater role for support services increased understanding of IPR new relationships with students as they become collaborators in OER production, release and use  Other sectors (eg, employers, public bodies, private bodies, 3rd sector)access to re-purposable content input to scoping, development and endorsement of OER in their focus areanew potential partnerships with content providers and other sectorsupskilling - increased understanding of IPR, curriculum development and learning technologiesunderstanding of customer needs - (for example, commercial publishers  finding out what kinds of OER and learning resources are wanted by teachers and/or learners)
• #14: Librarians have a wealth of knowledge and expertise that can already fit perfectly well within an OER landscapeUnderstanding the importance of metadata and describing resources in a consistent and standardised mannerYour research skills and knowledge of evaluating and qualifying resourcesThe ability class and categorise information and create subject based finding aidsAnd your knowledge around copyright can be transferred into the ability to aid and promote the use of open licensing
• #15: Open licences have emerged to protect an authors rights in environments where content can easily be copied, some within the OER world say that the key benefit of OER is that it is free but this is a rather simplistic view of the world. Open content can be shared with others without asking permission and witout paying licence or other access feesCC-Zero The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. See Other Information below. CCBY lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials. CC BY-SA lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposesas long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projectsCCBY-ND This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.CCBY-NC This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. CC BY-NC-SA This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. CC BY-NC-ND This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.
• #16: Creative CommonsThe Creative Commons Organisation was established a few years ago in the United States and was an attempt to deal with the issue of material on the Internet. It tries to strike a balance between copyright restrictions and the protection of material. Now there are Creative Commons jurisdictions for most countries in the world. Basically, Creative Commons works, by the owner of a resource creating their own licence stating what you can and can’t do with their material. There are 4 different types of licences, ranging from:Yes, you’re free to use the material as long as you acknowledge that it’s mine to No, you can’t use this under any circumstances unless you ask for my permission.You can also create your own licence and embed it in your website or resource. Click on the licence link on the home page to access the licence generator and you will be accessed some questions and then your licence will be created and you will be given code to embed in your site. This short video explains creative commons and highlights the benefits of a creative commons licence - http://creativecommons.org/videos/get-creative
• #17: Managing and ensure retrievability and find ability of open educational resources is best done by using a repositoryOpen Courseware Consortium Over one hundred educational institutions including Oxford (Maths Institute), MIT, UC Berkeley A wealth of material of varying depth Search interface has few configurable fieldsInternet Archive Vast collection No easy method to search by licence (although it is there who don’t mind parsing an xml document for their results) Nevertheless much of the collection is public domain Also home of the Wayback Machine – the contents of which are not open contentConnexions OER for all levels – primary to higher education Allows creation of ‘lenses’ – collections of material chosen by a particular user Search interface allows staged refinement of searchesJamendo Open content music hosting Basic and slightly confusing search interfaceCCSearch Run by the Creative Commons project Not just educational material Cross-searches many sources of open content Accuracy of licence metadata is generally goodOER Commons Large quantity of material Complex search interface available, if a little confusingSlideshare Not solely educational material Licensing is input ‘on-site’, so accuracy of licensing metadata is very good Search interface is fairly basic but has all essential features Content is almost entirely presentations or supporting notes – beware false authority
• #19: So we’ve looked at how we manage and find OERs spoke a little bit about using an open licence such as creative commons to apply conditions of use to your OERs, you’ve had the opportunity to have a look at some of the OER repositories and where you can find content at all levels of garnularity from packaged courses to single image files where you can adapt and reuse...this brings us nicely to the other side of the coin,ng and if you embrace using and repurposing OER you should think about getting involved and creating and sharing your own open educational resources.All librarians in my experience love a check list and there are an abundance of tools and guides you can use but here’s my very basic list of what to consider when creating your own!Start small – offer a small element of your work to begin with so you can get a feel for the processLicensing check any materials you want to include for IPR or copyright, and use the correct channels for ensuring clearance and permissions, also consider what creative commons licencse you want to apply to your OERsCollaboration – is the resource something that your team could get involved in or it could be something that ARLG work on togetherStrategy – having a process or strategy ib place for how to sustain and maintain the creation and release of OERs, will you have a set amount you want to produce per term or how much OER learning hours you want to release in an academic yearLocalization As previously mentioned, localization is part of the OER process: it is the way for individuals to contribute their perspectives and contextual experiences within an educational resource. The materials you create and share are a valuable resource for others to use or build upon. These materials help extend OER into becoming both a scalable and sustainable practice. File format: Create materials in the most flexible formats available. HTML is one of the most widely available formats—HTML documents can be viewed with any web browser and the files are easily modifiable. Another popular format for document creation is Microsoft Word. Because Microsoft Word is a commercial product, some people may not own this program. Instead of saving your material as a Word document (.doc format), save the Microsoft Word document as a text (.txt) file or a rich text format file (.rtf). Both .txt and .rtf formats can be opened with any word-processing program. Design : Keep the design of your materials simple. Following W3C’s 10 Quick Tips to Make Accessible Web Sites, will help make your materials accessible to those with disabilities. Sharing: Make your materials easy to find by submitting them to an OER repository like OER Commons. This helps others find your materials because they can be searched by many factors, such as keywords, grade level, subject area, or type of material. License: License your materials using a Creative Commons license so others can use, re-use, or remix your work.
• #20: Xerte Online Toolkits (www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/) is a server-based suite of tools for content authors. Elearning materials can be authored quickly and easily using browser-based tools, with no programming required.GLO Maker (www.glomaker.org) software allows you to plan, design and preview learning objects. The GLO Maker website includes GLO Maker software, a number of tutorials and full user guide that you can download.Xpert's attribution tool (www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/attribution) helps you to find learning objects, photos, video and sound that are in the public domain and licensed under Creative Commons or other licences. Once you've found what you want to use, you can download it with the source automatically attribuArticulate has a very similar interface to PowerPoint and so is quite intuitive to use. I liked the built-in screen capture facility and character interaction feature but felt it was aimed more at a business audience.Captivate seemed to be a useful tool for creating demonstrations and tutorials but offered less in the way of user interaction. For me its disadvantage was the complexity of the interface and lack of clear guidance. However we only used it on a short trial and so didn’t have time to test all the features and functionality. One of the main issues we came across with all of them was the amount of time involved in learning how to use the software and in actually creating anything functional and attractive.ted.(NB You may still have to check the terms of use from the original location).Use Camtasia to…Record your screen to capture PowerPoint slides, software demos, webpages, and more Edit your screen recordings and camera video by cutting, splicing, and combining clips with the powerful, yet easy to use, video editor Import camera video, music, photos, and more to truly enhance your screen recordings Customize your screen recordings and videos with ready-to-use media themes, animated backgrounds, graphics, callouts, and more Create interactive videos with clickable links, table of contents, search, and more Easily share videos that your viewers can watch anywhere, on nearly any device
• #21: Institutions who do have success with OER in the main follow a common model: