Open Educational Resources

Welcome to this short talk introducing Open Educational Resources (or OERs for short). We’ll point out some of the defining features of OERs, and have a look at the barriers, incentives, and benefits pertaining to their use. We’ll also touch on the topic of “Open Educational Practices”, which include effective ways to use OERs. We’ll begin by talking about how OERs relate to Open Research.

The most obvious connection between Open Research and Open Educational Resources lies in their shared openness. In fact according to UNESCO’s definition, open research materials are themselves open educational resources “by default”. Here’s how UNESCO defines the term:

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.” — https://www.unesco.org/en/open-educational-resources

That said, “research materials” often only become useful and usable when some background knowledge is in place. OERs can play a role in helping to establish that knowledge, thereby opening up research to engagement that goes beyond “access to materials”. It’s also the case that educational materials are only one part of a learning experience. Depending on the topic domain, effective use of OERs might be supported by a teacher, peers, or structured on-the-job learning opportunities, and so forth. The notion of Open Educational Practices has been developed to talk about easily shared methods of structuring learning. We’ll come back to that topic after a deeper look at OERs.

OERs and open reseacrh

Open Educational Resources may be intended for classroom use, or for self-study. They can be written by experts, or “crowdsourced” by people with varied backgrounds. In relation to open research, relevant OERs would range from openly-licensed textbooks that educators can use to help their students develop general-purpose research skills — all the way to highly specialised training that helps people get involved with a specific open research project. To put it quite bluntly, if you’re developing open research and are not developing accompanying OERs, you may be missing a trick. That’s because without suitable OERs to accompany your open research, people are likely to find it harder to build on your work, or get involved with your project.

You’re looking at an example

This series of videos is a collection of OERs related to open research practices. The videos, scripts, and assets (where possible) are not only available to watch online — but are also available under licensing terms that permit reuse and remixing. This helps illustrate a general point, which is that if you produce OERs you — or whoever owns the copyright — can decide how to licence them. However, if you’re building on others’ OERs, or if you decide to incorporate third-party materials in your work, you need to respect the copyright and any licence that applies to those materials.

OER creation workflow

In line with the definition presented earlier, the steps to creating an OER are relatively simple: (1) Develop an educational resource, (2) (a) select a suitable licence, and (b) make sure it’s clear to readers how the licencing terms apply (e.g., how to attribute derivative works), and (3) share the OER, for instance in a public repository or web page.

So what…? Reuse and remixing

Let’s briefly give some further attention to the questions “why?” and “so what?”. A key benefit of OERs is that anyone who can access the resource has the right to re-use and remix it with any other OERs which are available under compatible licences. As remarked in guidance provided by OER Commons (which is a large repository of OERs):

“[Remixing] is especially helpful when you would like to adapt the material to learners’ needs, localize content to make the material more accessible, or add revised data to keep your resource current and up to date while preserving the original.”

In short, OERs can help educators save time, can help everyone save a good amount of money, and increase quality and improve the learning experience in several ways.

Barriers and incentives for using OER

Notwithstanding these potential benefits, people may hesitate to use or create OERs if they have trouble finding relevant quality-assured open materials, or if they aren’t familiar with the way open licensing works. Another barrier to the creation of OERs can be summed up as “poor incentives”. Why would educators (or educational institutions) — who are typically in the business of charging money to deliver an educational experience — give away some of the core parts of that experience? One answer is that decisions to publish OERs are often more mission-driven than business-driven. That said, OER “branding” can provide marketing and publicity opportunities, and OERs can fulfil other business-relevant functions; for example, including contributions to OER production in assigned coursework can enhance the student experience, by putting students in touch with a global community. Reusing OER produced by others can also save money and potentially increase quality. MIT’s OpenCourseWare and the OU’s OpenLearn initiatives are relevant examples of the institutional use of OERs. Notably, both of these projects make course materials available under the terms of the CC BY NC SA licence, a licence that forbids the sale of reworked materials. By contrast, Wikiversity currently collects 143 courses under the fully open-source-compliant CC BY SA licence. The different licensing options support different use cases.

Students’ perspective

All else equal, students are likely to appreciate it if instructors assign open materials, particularly because of the cost considerations. “Ease of use” is another relevant factor for students, both for formally-assigned course materials and any supplemental self-study materials. For students, quality of learning and recognised qualifications are crucial. On that note, one ongoing challenge for learning with OERs is how to incorporate assessment. Even where assessments are built into OERs, those assessments do not always lead to a certification; when they exist, such certificates may not be recognised by employers. Complementing OERs with replicable “Open Educational Practices” including peer interaction and “peer assessment” can help bring about robust learning outcomes.

Co-creating and extending OERs: next steps for this project

In closing, let’s return again to this video series as an example of an open-research-relevant OER. The video series has been developed to provide a quick introduction to a variety of open research practices. Each video has accompanying material that people can look into if they want to take a deeper dive. Our plan is to share the scripts for these videos with the UKRN’s Training Community of Practice, and collectively revise the content into a textbook. Several general purpose OERs on Open Research already exist — such as the PaPOR TRAIL and the Global OER Graduate Network OR Handbook (linked below) — the hope is that a community-driven project can build in further specific dimensions of quality around “growing and embedding open research in institutional practice and culture”. Watch this space: the video description will be updated to include information on how you can get involved in future editions of this material.

References

Egan S, Tobin M, Palmer B et al. Developing an open educational resource for open research: Protocol for the PaPOR TRAIL project [version 1; peer review: 2 approved]. HRB Open Res 2020, 3:84 (https://doi.org/10.12688/hrbopenres.13171.1)

Farrow, R. (ed.), et al. (2023). The GO-GN Open Research Handbook. Global OER Graduate Network / Open Education Research Hub. https://go-gn.net/gogn_outputs/open-research-handbook/