Introduction to Open Educational Resources 2012

Editor's Notes

• #16: The key aspect of an OER is that it is both discoverable online – so that people can find it AND openly licensed - so that people can legally make use of it. OER includes texts, different forms of media, ideas, as well as documented teaching strategies/techniques or practices. Advocates of openness would suggest that the value in OER is in its potential to support learning in many ways and in many contexts.
• #18: So open educational resources are part of a larger open movement, which harnesses the affordances provided by the internet, and aims to increase access to information. Open access to research, open availability of data, open science for global collaboration, open source software are all part of this movement.
• #19: A growing body of online content is now available under Creative Commons which means teachers anywhere in the world can discover, adapt, mix it with other resources, improve it and use it for teaching their students. Open educational resources are materials which can be discovered online by teachers, and legally downloaded and used for teaching. This is because of the open license, typically Creative Commons, which enables the creators of content to designate it for reuse. Open educational practices (OEP) is defined as use of openly licensed OER and online resources to raise the quality of education and training and innovate educational practices on institutional, professional and individual level (Conole, 2011)Conole, G. (2011). Towards Open Educational Practices. e4innovation Blog posted Friday, January 7th, 2011. Accessed online: http://e4innovation.com/?p=406
• #20: So what is meant to happen is a cycle of teaching material evermore being improved and shared. Plus it is all legal under the terms of the open license.
• #21: Image 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/courosa/2922421696/ Image 2: http://veja.abril.com.br/imagem/professorantenado.jpgImage 3: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stylianosm/3706684606/Image 4: http://www.flickr.com/photos/langwitches/3460307056/
• #22: A growing body of online content is now available under Creative Commons which means teachers anywhere in the world can discover, adapt, mix it with other resources, improve it and use it for teaching their students. Open educational resources are materials which can be discovered online by teachers, and legally downloaded and used for teaching. This is because of the open license, typically Creative Commons, which enables the creators of content to designate it for reuse. Open educational practices (OEP) is defined as use of openly licensed OER and online resources to raise the quality of education and training and innovate educational practices on institutional, professional and individual level (Conole, 2011)Conole, G. (2011). Towards Open Educational Practices. e4innovation Blog posted Friday, January 7th, 2011. Accessed online: http://e4innovation.com/?p=406
• #26: Sharing OER requires more than simply a facility for sharing – there are plenty of options for people wanting to share these days. It seems more important to focus on a change in academic practices, to ensure academics know the risks of sharing, use content they have the rights to share, and maximize exposure – if that is what they desire. Shift question from ‘why should I share my educational content?’ to ‘how can I stay in control of the process of my educational content being shared?’ (Butcher, 2010)
• #32: The first example is of the IEEE chapter using our CHED computer literacy guides for lab training. Students from the chapter actually wrote to us asking for permission to use the guides. We were able to say “yes absolutely!” they are freely available on our website and the Creative Commons license provides the terms for reuse.
• #33: Next we have a screencast which was created to help people apply the creative commons to offline works. The video was well received and has since been translated into Czechoslovakian, French, Italian and Spanish.
• #34: Of course the A guide for first year students, which was a resounding success and has been used by the University of Venda and the University of the Western Cape to help new students acclimate to the university environment.
• #35: One of our greatest stories of reuse was that or Matumo Ramafekeng, whose materials which were published as OER on OpenContent, were selected for publishing in the Journal of Occupational Therapy of Galicia, an open access journal for occupational therapists in the Spanish speaking world
• #37: So often we are apprehensive about sharing our works in progress, our thoughts, our notes, our ideas. Technology today provides us many opportunities to share the process of our learning, rather than just the final product. We can share our reflections and ideas on blogs, our thoughts on Twitter or Facebook, and people can instantly comment and contribute to our own ideas. This goes for teaching materials as well, which are sometimes imperfect or not highly refined. In sharing digital media, we may become teachers to someone who is interested in our work. As they follow our thought process, connect to our ideas and references, they may benefit tremendously from us openly sharing the process of our own learning.