Open Educational Resources: About OER

Potential Benefits of OER

• Customization: Faculty can customize their class instruction for their students using OER and facilitate more meaningful, inclusive pedagogical practices and engage students more deeply in the educational process, moving beyond lecture and text.

• Free or low-cost: OER programs report saving students millions on the cost of education. Low costs mean that students can access course materials from the start of class and, therefore, have every opportunity to succeed.

• Increased support for "plug and play" resources: For instructors who have little time to adapt resources, OER projects like OpenStax and the Open Learning Initiative (Carnegie Mellon) are increasingly making "packaged" resources available. Packaged resources include textbooks with accompanying ancillary resources (slides, clicker exercises, learning materials) and entire course and course modules.

Potential Challenges of OER

• Complex IP issues: Although OER use open licenses in part to reduce complexity around intellectual property, issues do arise. Open licensing in itself can be a challenge to navigate; in addition, third-party materials like media and images be introduce complexity into any OER project.

• Missing ancillary resources: Most open resources tend to lack instructor copies, outlines, quizzes/tests, and materials that can make publisher offerings attractive.

• Permanence and quality issues: Digital information - including OER - can disappear if it's not archived and backed up in a trusted repository; OER may be produced with little added support for copy-editing and design and some may not be updated as frequently as the education community might like.

Copyright

• Copyright is a form of intellectual property law which protects original works.

• Copyright protects original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works. Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed. Copyright covers both published and unpublished works.

Public Domain

• A public domain work is a creative work that is not protected by copyright, which means it's free for you to use without permission.

• Works in the public domain are those whose intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable (ex: works of Shakespeare and Beethoven, the formulae of Newtonian physics, the patents of powered flight, etc.).

License

• A license is permission provided by a copyright owner to use their copyrighted work. Behind all licensed works, there are copyright owners who've granted permission. 

Open License

• An open license is a type of license that grants permission to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and/or redistribute a work with few or no restrictions, these traits of an open license are referred to as the "5Rs," see above for more information on these traits.

• The 5Rs are what differentiate open license materials and free materials as they allow you permission to do so much more!

Creative Commons Licenses

• Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that aims to make licensing work and accessing public domain resources simple for individuals, educational institutions and other organizations across the globe.

• By providing clearly labeled and easy-to-understand  Creative Commons licenses as well as public domain tools, they have created a user-friendly and standardized way for all of us to grant permissions to and access each others' copyrighted works.

• Learn how Creative Commons opens doors to innovation in your teaching, research, or creative endeavors by going to the tab labeled Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are legal tools that creators and other rights holders can use to grant certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights. CC licenses are written as an agreement between the author and the general public, making usability and share-ability the default rather than restricting use. CC licenses allow the end user to know what they can do with a material while the creators retains copyright to the resource. In academic settings, they are most commonly applied to open access journal articles, scholarly monographs, or open educational resources including teaching materials like textbooks, assignments, etc.

Understanding License Terms

• All works held under Creative Commons licenses are indicated with this icon: 

• A CC-licensed work can then have four different license terms attached to the license to allow certain permissions to the user: attribution (BY), no derivative works (ND), share alike (SA), and non-commercial (NC)

• These four license terms define the rights the user has to the work. Each of these rights is also indicated with a specific icon so that licenses are clearly labeled for users.

• Creative Commons licenses are a combination of the elements discussed above - there are six licenses in total.