Open Education ensures that teachers, learners and institutions can fully explore this potential. Imagine an American History textbook with the latest news from the run-up to the 2018 election, or a math tutorial that incorporates local landmarks into word problems. All of this and more is possible when the pathways for technology in education are fully open. (SPARC, 2020)
For this activity, you will find an open educational resource in an open education repository and review the content, license, and file format for adaption.
Find an OER using a repository. The OER can be in any format or subject area that interests you.
Review the content. Using the Faculty Guide for Evaluating OER evaluate the OER for reuse.
Review the license and file format. Identify if the OER license is compatible for adaption and under what conditions. Identify if the file format will make it easy to edit.
List of OER Repositories
Complete this Activity
Share in the comments what you learned from the process. For example, asnwer the following quesiotns:
- Was it easy to find a resource in your area?
- After you applied the Faculty Guide for Evaluating OER what areas was the resource lacking?
- Was the license and format information easy to find?
Image Credit: Is licensing really the most important question for OER? by opensource.com license under CC BY-SA 2.0
For this activity I was looking for resources to enhance remote work. I discovered Julie Cronin’s list of suggested activities for distance learning, shared on the OER commons, CC BY 4.0. It didn’t take very long to find it or discover the proper licensing for the material, and the only areas where the resource was lacking was that it was only offered as a PDF, and that it didn’t seem to have peer review elements, though I’m uncertain whether the latter is a consideration particularly relevant for the type of resource I found.
I decided to look up an OER for environmental health science with the purpose of educating students about how the environment is linked to their health. Using the OER Commons website, I was able to find one very quickly through it’s search feature. The Environmental Health Science and Technology Education OER, provided by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, is aimed to increase student and public awareness of the impacts that environmental factors can have on health. It’s within the public domain, so people are able to freely use, share, or adapt it.
It was quite easy to find the licensing for this OER through OER Commons as it is provided with the description of the OER. The resource links to a webpage dedicated to environmental health science education, and offers a number of educational categories to explore based on groups such as students or sciences. It provides its materials in text, PDFs, and podcasts. It links to other related websites and research (most provided by NIH) as supplementary material.
Using the evaluation guide, I found that the resource to be quite suited for my purpose. The material in the OER is well-written, peer-reviewed, and also clearly labels which materials are best suited to which age groups/education levels for students (grades 9-12, 12+, etc.). Unfortunately, although they do provide things such as podcasts, transcripts are not provided for them, which is an accessibility problem.
It also does not provide any learning activities, only providing links to other resources to explore on health topics.
Overall, this seems like a good OER, especially since the public domain license allows for re-use and even adaption. It can definitely be used to raise awareness of environmental impacts on health, and encourage further study in the topic. People who use this OER must still be cautious to check the licensing for the supplementary material that is provided though, as it isn’t guaranteed the public domain license can be applied to websites outside of the NIH.
I decided to investigate course material from the “Basics of Criminal Law” course hosted on OER. The author retains a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license. From what I understand, this means that while the content can be used for private study, it cannot be used for commercial purposes. As I am not an expert in criminal law, it is difficult to assess the verity of the information contained on the site, and unfortunately OER does not make information about the author accessible. This prevents users from assessing the value of this source.
https://www.oercommons.org/courses/basics-of-criminal-law
I am planning to adapt existing OER’s and create additional content to produce an OER for a discipline-specific first year scholarly writing course. I already had an idea what related OER’s exist in my area, but I wanted to see if I could find any of them using one of the three repositories listed here. One of the OER’s I’d already identified came up easily in the search.
When I looked at this OER, EmpoWord (https://pdx.pressbooks.pub/empoword/) ,using the faculty evaluation guide, it checked off almost every box. It seems like a lot of thought, design and attention to detail went into its creation. The main area I identified for improvement was not enough student engagement activities. There was a lot of information, presented in quite large bodies of text, that I think could have been broken up with Hp5 interactive activities. There were suggested assignments at the end of each chapter, but I felt there could have been more interaction woven in to connect each point to the students’ experiences.
The license and format were easy to find and I think it would be easy and highly beneficial to adapt this resource for aspects of my course.
I decided to look for videos about how the Federal Reserve works as part of the US financial system. Through the OER Commons i found a link to some videos hosted by MRU, which focuses on economics education. The video production quality is high. The videos do not have embedded questions, but they do have closed captions. Based on MRU’s Creative Commons license (which was easy to find), I can use but not modify the materials.
I explored an OER in experiential learning, called from Garden to Plate, designed for use in grade school to each children about growing food and the agriculture industry. It provided extensive instructions on materials needed, methods of evaluation, and tips for teachers to adapt it for their classroom. There were photos of the gardens that resulted from various applications of the resource and it looked as if it had benefitted from several remixes. I did not see anything there that precluded modification of materials.
I explored the OER “Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory,” which was part of a series of OER courses on pragmatics. It provided the structure of a full course complete with a syllabus, recommended readings, lecture notes, and activities. One weakness of the material provided was that the lecture notes were not fully self-explanatory and would require supplemental instruction (i.e., lecture, textbook, etc.). Additionally, it provided access to most, although not all the required readings, potentially posing a problem in terms of individuals’ ability to access them. The license of OER easy to find as it was clearly placed in the “About” section of the course. The course was given an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 licence, which allows for it to be reworked to better suit one’s needs and to be redistribute.
I looked into “2020 Post Elections Resources” on OER: https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/74048
The content is somewhat reusable because it is focused on the US election from Illinois, however the teaching strategies and questions can be generalizable if other teachers want to use the same questions in a different context or time period.
The license is under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 which allows the copy and redistribution of material, and the remix, transformation for any purpose, so there is high flexibility for material reuse. In terms of formatting, it is a PDF file so not easy to edit unless it is converted back into a word document.
The OER I chose is ‘Learning Statistics with R: A tutorial for psychology students and other beginners’ by Danielle Navarro (https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/559). This book is shared under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. The resource is provided in PDF and Latex formats, making it reasonably easy to edit in Latex format (though perhaps not exactly common knowledge as a text editing program such as Word). This resource does well in every area of the Faculty Guide for Evaluating OER, but could perhaps improve the ability to enhance student learning by providing sample code in .r files rather than only as text which would have to be pasted into a .r file to run.
Yes, the resource was easy to find and contained the exact information I was looking for. The resource did have accessibility limitations as only a pdf version was present. The license information was easily accessible but the only translation was allowed and no information on modification was present. In addition, the report also disclaimed that some information from third parties may be subject to infringement rights and citation of resources is essential.
I found an open educational resource that was actually about creating open textbooks, which was really neat. It is an Accessibility Toolkit developed by BCcampus in partnership with a couple of institutions. It was very easy to find this resource on OER Commons. The details about the resource were very accessible as well. It is licensed CC BY, so it would be available for reuse and adaption. You can download the resource in various formats, including EPUB, PDF, MOBI, HTML, OpenDocument, and more. The resource may be lacking in accessibility for audio/video files (I am unsure if there are any in this resource) and I am uncertain if it was peer reviewed. Overall, the ease and applicability of this resource was great, which is a positive experience for those looking for OER in the future.
Resource link: https://www.oercommons.org/courses/accessibility-toolkit-2nd-edition-open-textbook/view
I chose a textbook on information literacy, which I found using Open Textbook Library. Open Textbook Library prominently displays license type. The resource I chose had a CC-NC-SA license, which means that I could adapt the work non-commercially as long as I used the same license type for my creation. It can be downloaded as a pdf, epub, or xml file.
The book was written by members of the iSchool at the University of Albany. It is well written, free from typos and mistakes as far as I can tell, and includes interactive activities for students to complete. Overall, it is a very high quality resource and is something I would pass on to library students who wanted a deep dive into information literacy. One thing I did notice was that the book was very infographic heavy, and that the alt text used to describe these infographics was seriously lacking. For example, the authors included a complex infographic about scoping, and that alt text simply noted what the infographic was, not the information that it contained. As a result, this document is not particularly accessible to those relying on screen readers (though, now that I think of it, I don’t know if ‘closed’ resources are much better!)
https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/190
I chose to look into literacy and searched for resources related to online/web literacy. I used the BC Campus Open Textbook collection to find my resource, which was Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers (https://open.bccampus.ca/browse-our-collection/find-open-textbooks/?uuid=ccbb4e77-b20f-4dec-8a9f-67ccc9bc774b&contributor=&keyword=&subject=). I found it really easy to find something related to my topic in this collection as the collection was easy to search by keyword.
When evaluating the resource, I felt it was very high quality and was surprised by how new it was (less than a year old). I found the use of alternative formats really useful as well. The only weak area I noticed was in the ability for students to engage in active learning. It was a traditional textbook in the sense that it did not include embedded videos or other active learning objects, but it did have activities for the readers to complete on their own (e.g. steps to follow in fact checking a website). However, they did include many screenshots, photos, and links to outside sources. It would be easy to use the editable format provided to add in videos or activities to engage students further.
BC Campus makes it very easy to identify the license used, as they have it stated directly on the main resource page. This particular work used a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (except where otherwise noted) which does allow for sharing and adaptation with credit to the authors. They also provide multiple file formats for the textbooks, including both readable formats (website, PDF, Kindle download, eReader download) and editable formats (Pressbooks XML). Clearly the items in the BC Campus library undergo review before they are added into the collection in order to keep the quality high.
On OER Commons, I easily found contents contain Seniors Care. The material I selected via resource links is Managing Long-Term Care Services for Aging Populations provided by JHSPH Open Courseware, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic.
The materials are in PDF format. Using the evaluation guide, the course materials are easy to navigate, the license allows for educational reuse and modifications. It is in PDF format. Interactivities are lacking, and I didn’t find opportunities to test understanding of the materials; however, overall the material is a traditional textbook with clear information and interactive interface. It is easy to follow along with course materials.
I found this video as an open educational resource. It has a creative commons license. It is a video of a woman who has experienced domestic violence, talking about her experience. I use it as a starting place for students to consider how to do an assessment. It is a great way of “bringing” in a client voice. In terms of evaluation, it is relevant, and of good quality. Although the video is not subtitled, they do include a transcript for accessibility. It is a great resource for encouraging interaction in the classroom. It can’t really be adapted for my purposed. I have used this in my classroom and will continue to do so.
https://content.iriss.org.uk/criminaljustice/shavita.html
As a manager of students in Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) positions, I explored the “WORK INTEGRATED LEARNING OPEN MODULE INITIATIVE” hosted through Niagara College’s website. There are over 30 modules, licensed under CC BY NC 4.0. They’re meant to be compiled to contribute to courses related to WIL. However, I have some concerns with this resource in terms of accessibility. It is mostly comprised of videos, which do have captioning available, but the transcript appeared over my video in my browser so it was a bit poorly configured. While I could put it in a Canvas course or our WordPress training resources, it’s not in a format that allows for editing. https://www.niagaracollege.ca/cae/wil/ I would love to have raw files available for my student staff to engage with and adapt to become context-specific- or at least to be able to do so with the transcripts, since video projects are quite time-consuming and substantial.
To add: I did find source files through Google Drive, so perhaps editing is an option after all! ^
This was an interesting activity in the sense that it highlighted for me some of the challenge of finding OER materials via the repositories relevant to the content/context I was looking for. I explored an OER called ‘User-friendly OER Course Design for Remote & Face-to-Face’. The faculty guide was useful in helping to assess the resource. In the end, the resource had a fairly simple license that allowed for sharing and adaptation so long as there was appropriate attribution. The materials would be difficult to adapt, as I wasn’t able to download them in any way, so one would need to get creative. Very interesting!
I found a resource that I may incorporate/use in my summer class: https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/28044
Overall, the material is accurate and relatively easy to use, including a slide deck, textbook chapter-like reading, videos, and activities for students to complete. My only “complaints” are that I don’t find the resource particularly conducive to active learning unless I make some changes; this should be easy to do for the slide deck since it is offered in pptx format (so, editable). The written material is only available in PDF, unfortunately, but I could still annotate it before making it available to students. However, there is a comments box to provide feedback and ask questions, which I appreciate. The licensing was very clear (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
For this activity, I looked at Tal Sanders’s Introduction to Technical Theatre, which I found through MERLOT. It was easy to find the license and format information because it was readily available on the MERLOT site. The book is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license and is available as a PDF. However, I thought that its availability in a single format might make it less accessible to some students. There are no captions under images and diagrams, which might make it difficult for visually impaired students to access all of the book’s content. Further, the no derivatives element of the license might also be limiting in terms of what can be done to adapt it to a particular course.
I looked at “Online Statistics Education: An Interactive Multimedia Course of Study,” found through the OER Commons. It was easy to find a resource in statistics. The information was relevant for an introductory course, and it seemed that the resource had been edited thoroughly for inaccuracies/errors. The layout was very clear with key concepts broken down into chapters and subsections. In reviewing the license, I found that it was in the public domain, i.e., users are able to copy and reproduce with no limitations. However, the creator included that they would appreciate a citation if referencing the resource. In terms of formats, the information is available as a PDF or online. The creator has also offered to provide PPT slides, questions, and an instructor’s manual separately upon request for those interested.
Link: http://www.oercommons.org/courses/introduction-to-statistocs/view
I started my search in the OER Commons, but since I wanted something specific to information literacy, I decided to instead search the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy Sandbox. I looked at “Creating Literature Reviews”: https://sandbox.acrl.org/library-collection/creating-literature-reviews. The information is accurate, accessible, of high production quality, and licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The resource itself is a webpage, but includes links to handouts in PDF format, including a text-only version that includes accessible headings but is free of extra formatting. The resource is not set up for easy adaptation, as there are no editable files included. Files types include .html, video, and PDF.
I used MERLOT to search for OER textbooks that might be appropriate for my qualitative methods course. I found several interesting options though none were focused in a way that would make them ideal for my course. I am now thinking it will be better to identify a variety of open access journal articles and other materials. The book I looked at in detail was easily identified as having a CC license but with BY it would be possible to choose select chapters and include them as readings so long as there is full attribution.
I found an interesting Music Theory OER. The details of the license included a ‘no derivatives’ clause, which informs me that were I to make changes to the source material, I would not in turn be able to distribute the adapted materials. The content from the resource itself looks sound, but I do have concerns about the format and presentation of the resource. Both the layout and accessibility may compromise the ability for students to use the resource effectively, even though the content seems sound. Similarly, there is not anything in the way of interactivity, just a lot of scrolling. Whereas this content might work for my own learning (or re-learning from piano lessons taken 30 years ago), I would hesitate to try and incorporate this resource were I to be working with students in the discipline.
In my role, I provide guidance on how to create open educational resources. So I looked for “open learning” resources in OER Commons. I found Open-Source Image Depositories https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/78027 which was of interest to me given that I often provide advice on alternative places to search for copyright-free images.
Relevance
It meets my need in terms of addressing the gap in knowledge about where to look for images that are not copyrighted
Does not provide info about how to attribute images, which from an end-user perspective might be helpful.
Accuracy
The information is mostly accurate, although in once instance, in the description of the Blush website license, it said that you cannot redistribute – this is not entirely accurate; what the website says is that you cannot re-sell or redistribtue the images by themselves, you are still allowed to use it for commercial purposes. So the resource definitely needs some fine-tuning.
The document is by no means comprehensive and would require frequent updating; it might be best for it to continuously crowd-source inputs
It would have been helpful to know what the aimed scope of the document was, to understand why certain resources that are generally well-known may have been omitted
I would not call this a tool; it is a listing of websites, not something that actually guides you through the decision-making process. It is also listed as a “Diagram/ illustration”, which it is not. It is a document.
Production quality
It’s a basic document and it meets the need of finding a place to search for images that are free to use
Accessibility
This resource is only available in a PDF format, which is really unfortunate as this would make it impossible to modify. There is no reason why this could not have been a Word or ODT file
Interactivity
No interactivity, but the resource is meant to be a ‘performance support tool’, so I think the format is appropriate
Licensing
I feel that the license is unnecessarily restrictive – CC BY NC SA. A resource like this, gets outdated very quickly and the best way to keep it current is to have it in a format that others can easily contribute to and update. I would have licensed something like this under CC BY at most and would have invited people to send updates through a form, so this document is kept relevant.
Overall, I think the document could be useful either as an adaptation or as a source of research to draw upon. Although, as I mentioned, I find this licensing restrictive enough that I might look elsewhere, as these types of materials are available across many library websites.
The OER I located is “Library Carpentry.” It is a volunteer-run organization that focuses on building software and data skills within library and information-related communities, offering workshops and lesson materials by CC BY license, for self-directed study or for adaptation and re-use.
It was easy to find this resource, as I used specific keywords in my search and and searched Google but also affiliated organizations, such as the OLA (which added to the credibility of the OER). The license and format information was easy to find, as the organization also helps in understanding what the CC licenses apply to on their website, as well as the materials they have available.
I found an open tutorial on academic integrity. It was easy to find this resource, but I was searching under a broad subject area. The tutorial is set up with modules that walks users through each one as well as includes activities. The OER’s information seems to be accurate, and the resource is somewhat accessible. Audio and captions are available, but Flash is required to use the tutorial. The license is CC BY-NC-SA and is easily findable. I am not sure, however, how someone would go about adapting this resource as I could not find an option to download or export the resource.
I found a social work book called Scientific Inquiry to Social Work from OER Commons. The license is very easy to find. The resource is easy to access too. I look up the evaluation list and I think the resource can be better if it has more interactive components.
Although I don’t currently teach any courses, I decided to look for some resources in my research area. I found a basic 8 session course on nuclear magnetic resonance from MIT OpenCourseWare using OASIS. The resources included lecture notes, labs and animations. The animations required quicktime player which is discontinued so it seems that this resource is not in a basic format that will be useable in the future. (Also, quicktime is a more Mac related product and I have a Windows machine.) The lecture notes were in pdf format so again, not the easiest format to use for remixing and editing content. The license was listed on the search page so very easy to find.
I evaluated an OER called Weber Web [https://rosariorogel.net/weberweb/], which is a webpage created by Mexican sociology students about the classical sociologists Max Weber and Marianne Weber. I collaborated in the creation of this resource as a teaching assistant, so I reviewed it to identify how to improve this resource.
One issue with the webpage is that there are a couple of typos and spelling errors which cannot be easily corrected because they are located in images or videos. Another problem is that a lot of the content was created using external tools (for example Timeline JS or Canva), so it is not possible to download them as a pdf or as a text file.
Among the positives, the videos are high quality and have automatic subtitles, the website is easy to navigate and all the content is available with a CC-BY license.
For this activity, I was looking into some listening and speaking activity for Persian Language teaching. On Oasis, I found this link for a Youtube show called Cafe Denj. It is interersting that it is difficult to find it on Youtube itself but through the link shared here I was directly lead to the resource.
I don’t teach any courses, but I do support a lot of faculty in finding resources. One struggle is finding good, relevant and legally shared health materials. A lot of the open quiz banks outside of the OER repository structure are a little morally grey. For this exercise, I browsed OER commons to find Open material focused on activities and assignments. I chose this diagram: https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/77050/ – the content definitely seems relevant, and the microsoft word file format, while licensed, is a pretty universal program readable through various free software. However, access and saving images from word can be a little tricky and there is little data in the word doc file – should someone download it and forget who/where they got it from, the user would be hard pressed to figure out the TASL information from the doc.
Doing a reverse image look up, it appears that these diagrams were taken from an Open Stax textbook. While the textbook is CC-BY – best practice would dictate a little more attribution for these activities.
Furthermore this image based activity may be incredibly challenging for students with vision impairments. There is no alt-text or any of the images and all the text is embedded into the image. Room for improvement but will be a great resource for instructors and students.
I was looking for an open textbook suitable for an undergraduate level Intro to Logic course and I came across Introduction to Philosophy: Logic edited by Benjamin Martin: https://www.oercommons.org/courses/introduction-to-philosophy-logic/view
This text was easy to come across and began with chapters on “What is an Open Textbook?” and “How to Access and Use the Books” which clearly laid out all the advantages and options with the OA texts in this series.
It seems perfectly suited to the course, and is written at a good level for students who are new to philosophy. Although each chapter is a different author, the book is overseen and organized by an editor who arranges for peer review and revision. It can be downloaded in 9 formats (including editable formats), and can also be viewed online.
The Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license would allow the instructor to adapt, edit, and remix this material freely, as well as share it in any format. There are other philosophy textbooks in this series with the same license and formatting options, which could be blended together to provide a custom text. An instructor could also add their own material, or add links to related resources. The editor also suggests that instructors have students add to the text by creating new chapters or adding discussions/quizzes/activities.
This text does encourage some interactivity by including exercises that could be incorporated into teaching, but it would be mainly up to the instructor to develop activities and projects to create engagement with the material. There are also no audiovisual components to the text, which might help increase engagement. Overall the text seems like a great jumping off point for course materials.
1. Was it easy to find a resource in your area?
Yes! There are many resources in math education.
2. After you applied the Faculty Guide for Evaluating OER what areas was the resource lacking?
It was hard to understand in some cases if I can modify the material.
3. Was the license and format information easy to find?
Not always. Most of them have the classification Creative Common (yes or no). However, we need to look deeply to understand the details of what they allow or do not do with the material. The biggest challenge is still related to modifying the material, which is really common in education since we need to adapt to different needs and students.
Using OER Commons, I found a number of resources related to library-based instruction. I narrowed my search results down to just activities/labs for College level students and from these results picked the following resource to review: https://oercommons.org/authoring/58499.
Overall, the resource met a number of the Faculty Guide for Evaluating OER points. Areas where it was lacking were: no apparent peer review (and single author, so no clear collaborative development); no alternative formats available at present (PDF only); no opportunities to test understanding of the materials in the resource itself. License information about the resource was easy to find on OER Commons but isn’t listed on the resource itself. The resource does allow for educational reuse and modifications/adaptations of the materials, which is great, but providing only a PDF copy of the resource means that modifications will be more challenging to implement.
Although I don’t teach any courses at the moment, I find the Open University of Japan to be very useful. It is easy to find the material I am looking for whether it is philosophy or literature.