Main Body
2 Chapter 2 – Open Educational Resources
Limited Edition CC Shirt Designed by Shepard Fairey
Description
In this session we discuss the practice of finding, making and remixing open educational resources (OERs). This echos the BC Campus mantra, to “Find, Adopt and Modify” open textbooks, but also emphasizes the creative and production aspects of the EdMedia program (EMP). All resources produced in the EMP will be shared online as OERs. This will add value to our program by making your work accessible on this site.
By the end of the session you will:
- Be able to find local (SFU) resources and people regarding copyright OER opportunities.
- Be able to identify sources of open educational resources (OER’s) suited to your curriculum
- Be familiar with Creative Commons licensing and how to use it
- Practice creating OER’s by remixing media assignment
What is “Open education”
Tony Bates offers that “Open education can take a number of forms”:
- education for all: free or very low cost school, college or university education available to everyone within a particular jurisdiction, usually funded primarily through the state;
- open access to programs that lead to full, recognised qualifications. These are offered by national open universities or more recently by the OERu;
- open access to courses or programs that are not for formal credit, although it may be possible to acquire badges or certificates for successful completion. MOOCs are a good example;
– OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES that instructors or learners can use for free. MIT’s OpenCourseware, which provides free online downloads of MIT’s video recorded lectures and support material, is one example
- open textbooks, online textbooks that are free for students to use;
- open research, whereby research papers are made available online for free downloading;
- open data, that is, data open to anyone to use, reuse, and redistribute, subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share.
Why open?
Not all media for your courses needs to be created from scratch. Although that’s, generally,the aim of the EMP program, when time or resources are limited, development from scratch is not always possible. One of the tenants of “open education” that we explore is the idea of “reuse” and “remix”. Why reinvent the wheel if resources already exist in a form that you can use for your course? In some cases these resources are licensed specifically to be adapted and changed to fit your situation and needs. Resources like this, out there in post secondary education, are already beginning to impact both teaching and learning.
Take a few moments now to select and view a video ( or several) from the Why Open Education matters website (three samples are provided), and consider the questions below.
What do you think? What video stood out for you? Did you agree with any of the points that were made? Which arguments stood out? Do you have ideas about OER’s that were missing from the video?
Open Educational Resources ~ a definition
Freely available assets that have explicit licensing on them which are available through searchable online databases like Creative Commons. They are openly licensed documents and media that can be used for teaching, assessment and research. Although some people consider the use of an open format to be an essential characteristic of OER, this is not a universally acknowledged requirement. ~ Wikipedia
https://soundcloud.com/sfutlc/etug-2015_tony-bates
https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/8-6-media-or-technology/
Key things to know
More answers to the question “what is open education?” can be found over on the BCCampus website where a wealth of tools and information are available.
“Under the umbrella of open education, there are a number of specific ways in which this sharing of knowledge happens in higher education. These practices can include:
- Publishing research in open journals (open access publishing)
- Releasing data to be reused by others (open data)
- Using, sharing and collaboratively creating software and computer code (open source software)
- Flexible admission policies to institutions or courses (open admissions or open registration)
- Student assignments that promote student publishing or participating on the open web (open teaching or open pedagogy)
- Sharing of teaching and research practices (open scholarship)”
https://opentextbc.ca/opentextbook/chapter/structuring-your-open-textbook/
More from BC Campus
OER’s towards a definition
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/facultyoertoolkit/chapter/oer-definition/
Why open?
Not all media for your courses needs to be created from scratch. Although that’s, generally,the aim of the EMP program, when time or resources are limited, development from scratch is not always possible. One of the tenants of “open education” that we explore is the idea of “reuse” and “remix”. Why reinvent the wheel if resources already exist in a form that you can use for your course? In some cases these resources are licensed specifically to be adapted and changed to fit your situation and needs. Resources like this, out there in post secondary education, are already beginning to impact both teaching and learning.
Take a few moments now to select and view a video ( or several) from the Why Open Education matters website about OER’s that were missing from the video?
(This is my personal favorite video! 🙂
Finding and using open resources
Due to development costs (time and/or money) it can make more sense to find resources that have been created for a similar learning objective, and have been identified as shareable using the Creative Commons (CC) license. You may already be using CC resources, shared among your colleagues in your department, without even realizing it. The internet is a significant source for information and media, that is increasing CC licensed.
Open resources we have made: EdMedia participants have exceeded our expectations in almost every case with both the quality and quantity of media they have produced during our program, and gone on to produce afterwards. Here are a few highlights.
Info-graphic on Global Water Use and Water Wars Shiv Balram from the Geography dept. wanted to create some practical case study resources for his students that would provide alot of information, in an easily digestible, and mobile form. For his EMP project he chose to work on some custom infographics that could be shared with his students, and dove right into the EdMedia site with more posts than any participant to date. This work required him to get up to speed on Adobe Illustrator, and was provided with feedback along the way from the Ed Media team.
Scott Venners began asking about podcasting and wanted to explore the spatial relationships in data analysis, in three dimensions. Initially we talked about using Maya 3D software, but after participation in the EMP, he realized how much could be done with basic tools and screen recording. He began making videos for his class similar to what you would find at Khan academy, and has gone on to create a rich collection of resources on his youtube channel./ Sample clips of video lectures,
Math150/151 at SFU Jamie Mulholland, a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematics, came to the program with some video-making experience under his belt, but wanted to develop and hone his skills in making supportive and informative teaching videos that would enable him to effectively “flip” his classroom.
Open courses, and the media that’s in them.
Here are a few recent examples of open courses that use OER’s. You can see from these examples that there are a wide range of topics and media types, but essentially they all share some characteristics;
- They’re published on a public web page that has a link you can use to point to,
- They’ve been labelled with a CC license indicating the level of use that the author intends, and
- They’re cool!
Introduction to Learning Technologies (Links to an external site.) (U of S)
Video Game Law (Links to an external site.) (UBC)
Multi-device Course Companion for CMPT 363 (Links to an external site.) (SFU)
Where do you find these things? There are some general sites where you can find Open resources. This is a dynamically changing landscape so you may be able to find sources that are not listed here and more specific to your discipline or topic. As well, on popular websites such as YouTube, content may be available that can be linked to from your course.
Take some time, and explore the following links, and of course don’t forget to check “google it” first. Search Creative commons (Links to an external site.) Free Learning (Links to an external site.) OER commons (Links to an external site.) Connexions (Links to an external site.) Capilano Open courseware (Links to an external site.) P2PU (Links to an external site.) Image search Google (same as above, but using the images tab to review results) Flickr commons (Links to an external site.)– Looking up photo permissions on flickr. Where is the HTML code and photo file link? The SFU Image library Audio search: Free Music Archive (Links to an external site.) Jamendo (Links to an external site.) Soundcloud (Links to an external site.) And last, but certainly not least, with a current movement toward lower cost, and engaging textbooks… BC Campus – Open textbooks
A fairly comprehensive lists can be found on BCCampus website.
https://cloud.bccampus.ca/index.php/s/qWn6qraU05nzM03
Creative Commons
Your first activity may have had you explore the Creative Commons website (along with others) when you went looking for suitable assets. Once identified, these asset can be reused on you personal blog or you course.
The Creative Commons site is one of the most common locations to find OER’s, and also one of the most important places for you, as a member of the EMP program, to license your developed educational media assets! To explore Creative Commons further, head over to the “Basics of CC” website, and watch the video titled “a shared culture“. This will give you some insight onto why we use CC in our program.
Most important, when using CC licensed content, is to read the fine print. Each OER has its own license. Free use of an asset may not allow you editing or “remixing” of that content. To keep this movement going, and flourishing please identify, and respect creator required/recommended attributions.
You can read the fine print here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia .. or the ‘Coles Notes’ here: http://mollykleinman.com/2008/08/15/cc-howto-1-how-to-attribute-a-creative-commons-licensed-work/
Any new discoveries? Did you find an OER that you can use in your curriculum? After spending some time perusing the above sites, please share one that you think will work for your course and let us know how you envision its use.
Taking advantage of other peoples Open Educational Resources is one thing, but sharing your own work with the intention for others to use is a different process entirely. To begin you need a public website that you have access to publish to. It’s also helpful if you have some reliability that the site will remain stable for awhile, or if not that you can retrieve the content you publish there. In the EMP program we use the Educational Resources Share for this purpose. The posts there are open and accessible to the public. You may have already made a public comment to that site, but before you post new resources to share with others, its helpful to practice embedding media in the Canvas environment, which uses a similar technique
Canvas Commons
“Canvas Commons is a learning object repository or digital library that enables users to find, import and share educational resources. It contains content contributed by Canvas users all over the world.”
http://www.sfu.ca/canvas/instructors/canvas-commons.html
Meet Canvas Commons from Canvas LMS on Vimeo. Sharing in Canvas Commons Just yourself My institution only or sub-account Share with the public (All Canvas users from all over the world)
Copyright at SFU tips
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/facultyoertoolkit/
The SFU copyright office , and learn about our policies and services pertaining to copyright. The copyright office is your go to site for all copyright related questions and a wealth of resources. Including some handy tips for using fair dealing at SFU (hint: this piece was created as an EdMedia project). The Copyright Office also welcomes requests for departmental workshops and can be contacted via email at copy@sfu.ca
- Find resources that are explicitly usable
- You can link to content instead of copying it (to embed it in your course)
- Don’t assume publicly accessible files are ‘free’ or ‘open’
- Ask the owner if you are unsure
- Read the fine print.
- Permission to ‘use’ may not mean permission to ‘edit’.
Copyright at SFU. SFU opted out of its Access Copyright agreement on August 31, 2012. Please read AccessCopyrightOptOutAnnouncement.pdf to learn how this decision effects faculty, staff and students. SFU has a new Copyright office. Please review their website at http://copyright.sfu.ca if you have any questions or concerns about copyright.
Know how to use Fair Dealing
Short excerpts are are considered ‘acceptable use’ in a classroom environment, for educational purposes under a Fair Dealing exception. Our educational context covers us for “dealing”, while “Fair” refers to a limited amount used from a much larger work. For example you can use a poem from a book providing you only give access to the poem and not the entire book.
To learn more about Simon Fraser University’s policy for fair dealing review the following PDF: FairDealingR30.04AppendixA.pdf
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References and links
OER Repositories
Source: KPU Library, http://libguides.kpu.ca/c.php?g=183983&p=1212830
Creative Commons Search
Search a variety of media.
HippoCampus
A free academic web site that delivers rich multimedia content–videos, animations, and simulations–on general education subjects from middle-school to college level.
JORUM
UK. Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
MERLOT
MERLOT is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community.
MIT OpenCourseWare
A web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world.
NCLOR: The North Carolina Learning Object Repository
Provides a guest login. As a guest, you will only have access the items in the collections that have been made available to the public.
NSDL: National Science Digital Library
Digital resources and collections supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.
OER Commons
A portal for teaching and learning materials around the world.
Open Course Library
A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs.
Open Professionals Education Network: Find OER
Find openly licensed media elements to use within your courses.
OpenStax
View and share free educational material in small modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports or other academic assignments.
PhET
Interactive, research-based simulations of physical phenomena for free.
SOL*R
Shareable Online Learning Resources created by BC post-secondary educators. BCcampus
Wisc-Online
Wisc-Online is a small, high quality digital library of Web-based learning resources.
Open Ed [Media] Resources by Jason Toal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The Creative Commons license
EdMedia SFU – Open Educational Resources (OERs) by Jason Toal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://edmedia.tlc.sfu.ca/oer/ .
