FAQs
What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?
Open educational resources (OER) means teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or repurposing by others. OER permit educators to share, access and collaborate so they can customize and personalize content and instruction. OER permits educators to share, access, and collaborate so they can customize and personalize content and instruction. OER ensures that original authors are credited while enabling sharing and collaboration to further update and customize the content.
What difference will OER make in my child’s classroom?
OER create a pathway to deliver engaging, customized, and up-to-date content to students much faster and more cost effectively than today. Because OER permits collaboration and sharing, states and districts can offer students updated, customized content in multiple formats far more efficiently than ever before.
Are all OER materials online or digital?
No. It is important to note that OER refers only to the ability to share, collaborate and openly access a work, which means that OER can and do exist in any format including print, audio, video, digital and the like. At the same time, advancements in technology make possible deliver of content in multiple media formats, and the Internet in particular has been critical to produce and distribute OER for sharing and collaborating.
How can we guarantee the integrity of such resources?
Just like traditional textbooks, open textbooks are written by experts and produced by faculty members of higher education, experts as well as publishers. They are developed and must be approved in accord with state curriculum standards–approved by state and/or local officials–before they enter the classroom. For example, California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative reviews digital textbooks under the same content standards as other digital content. Professional societies are also beginning to certify certain OER as high quality using the same time-tested peer review process used for the leading scholarly journals.
Won’t this place an additional burden on classroom teachers?
OER is designed to help educators in the classroom personalize instruction with high-quality resources and to transform how teachers teach and students learn. By providing up-to-date and more engaging content to teachers and allowing them to customize and personalize it to reflect the needs of their students, they are better able to do their jobs. For example, if a teacher has the ability to bring several online resources into a lesson that includes text, multimedia, and a simulation, then that teacher may be able to reach a percentage of their students not easily engaged via traditional textbooks.
How much will this cost my school district?
In many cases, adopting OER provides a far better return on investment, because content can be shared, updated and accessed by a large number of teachers and students–there is less duplication of effort since materials can be shared widely and used freely.
Why can’t this sharing and collaboration occur right now?
Unfortunately, despite efforts to do so, collaboration and sharing has been hindered largely because traditional textbook content is typically locked under restrictive licensing and use agreements. This makes it far more difficult to impossible for even the most willing of states and districts to collaborate on common textbooks and resources, even in subject areas where content is largely homogenous between states and districts.
How does OER impact commercial publishers?
OER are publicly accessible learning materials. Just as there is public television and subscription versions of television programming that benefit all stakeholders, OER will provide publicly accessible learning materials to level the playing field, allow better personalization and customization for the educational resources sector. Specifically for publishers, OER provides them with freely available and accessible content that they can build upon to add additional value and commercialize. For example, publishers can–and are–using OER and other public domain content in their textbooks. For example, Flat World Knowledge is a commercial publisher of higher education textbooks that develops textbooks available under Creative Commons licenses. Teachers and learners can access Flat World textbooks for free online, and have the choice to purchase print on demand copies or supplemental resources.
What are some other benefits of OER?
OER enable the introduction of more varied learning resources into the classroom. These materials can better prepare students for the post-secondary school world. Experience and research shows that OER helps lead to more meaningful teaching and learning by enabling teachers and students to be active participants in the process. OER supports other important benefits, which include addressing language, accessibility, cultural and other barriers. OER can be translated into multiple languages and reformatted and repackaged into alternative formats to serve students with disabilities and special needs. OER permits local users to modify materials so they can become more culturally or locally relevant.
