1: Background and Introduction

Origins of OER

If you are reading this, then perhaps you, too, believe that Open Educational Resources (OER) benefits teaching and learning. OERs not only help mitigate the rising course material costs for students, they also provide faculty with a text unbound by publishers. Unbound means that they are largely self-published, openly and frequently updated, and they are re-mixable, easily providing students with course materials without having to use costly new editions.
 
The "Open" part of OER, relies on educators sharing their materials freely with students in a course, but sharing them freely in general. Allowing other educators to use them in their course, in part or in whole, so that they can then share their work and so on.  This open ecosystem allows educators to quickly iterate, providing the most up-to-date course materials to any course, all while students are netting the benefit from zero course material costs.

When did OER become a thing?

While the sharing of information and knowledge isn't a new concept in higher education, the shift from a business model to a more open-source model can be seen as relatively new. One of the earliest references that helped coin the term OER can be see within a report in 2002 UNESCO Forum on Open Courseware. The definition and the notions behind OERs were further expanded upon five years later by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Why Open Education Matters from Blink Tower on Vimeo.

 
In 2018, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, or ELI, published a definition of aspects and policies around OERs, stating that,

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or that have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others. OER confer significant dollar savings while also giving learners ready access to a wide range of high-quality, highly flexible educational materials. Open content offers faculty a means to customize curriculum to better align with learner needs and interests and to collaborate in new ways with peers worldwide. (7 Things You Should Know About Open Education)

Redistribution is aided by the Creative Commons movement, as it provided the avenue for creators to share works that could be reused by others while retaining attribution. From these three examples, we see another term develop at universities and other institutions: the Zero-Textbook course or ZTC. These are courses where the faculty have designed their course around OERs and other digital materials freely available to students and thus removing the additional cost burden of the expense of textbooks and other course-related material fees. Today, more and more institutions are working to bring OER options to students. Whether that is sourcing OER texts that are already available or providing faculty opportunities to author their own.

Slow but steady

The shift to more widely developed and available OERs has felt like a slow process in the eye of many instructional designers and faculty. As rising course costs increase, student demand could increase adoption. Although OERs can be written using any kind of word processing software, there are a lot of additional benefits of having an OER created through a web-based platform solution. The ability to update content easily, send out notifications to users of the text of changes, and provide accessibility features are just a few of the benefits of using a web-published host. It also provides more flexible options for remixing, or the ability to use whole or parts of the works in another OER. Later in this OER, we will take a look at LibreText and its Remixer tool that is built into their platform that was designed to leverage those features.

Tools and Resources

Other sources like Open Textbook Library, OpenStax and OASIS are common recommendations for faculty searching for a general open-texbook. Pressbooks is a platform built off the open source content management system (CMS) Wordpress, that provides faculty and institutions blogging-like tools to author OERs. 

From the perspective of research and journal articles, it is good to know what kind of digital access is available for students to academic journals through their university library.  Although this access may be free to them and incredibly valuable while they are a student, it is not truly open or free post graduation. A more open resource available is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which provide access to non-subscription based and Creative Commons published journals and articles.