This section presents a self-paced course on becoming an Open Educator. Materials are sourced from the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) course. Topics include definitions and practices of Open Education, benefits of practicing Open Education, how to find and use OER materials, how to create and share OER materials, and what Open practice, theory, and praxis look like. Learn more at your own pace.

OEPS 1.0 Course: Becoming an Open Educator — Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) & The Open University

• Contents
  • Welcome to the course
  • Learning outcomes
  • How to use the course
  • Using the reflective log
• 1. What Is ‘Open’ Education?
  • 1.1 Introduction
  • 1.2 What does ‘open’ mean?
  • 1.3 Open educational resources and open educational practices
  • 1.4 The practice of open educational resources
  • 1.5 Open licensing
  • 1.6 If you want to know more
• 2. Why Use Open Practices and Resources?
  • 2.1 Introduction
  • 2.2 The meaning of ‘open’ in open licensing
  • 2.3 Why use open educational resources (OER)?
  • 2.4 Why openly license my own materials?
  • 2.5 Digital literacies
  • 2.6 If you want to know more
• 3. Using Open Educational Resources
  • 3.1 Introduction
  • 3.2 Where can I find OER?
  • 3.3 Choosing a resource
  • 3.4 Attributing a resource
  • 3.5 Curating OER
  • 3.6 If you want to know more
• 4. How to Create and Share Open Educational Resources
  • 4.1 Introduction
  • 4.2 Remixing OER
  • 4.3 What do I need to consider when creating or remixing an OER?
  • 4.4 What license should I choose?
  • 4.5 How can I share my resources with others?
  • 4.6 If you want to know more
• 5. Putting Open into Practice
  • 5.1 Introduction
  • 5.2 Sharing processes and outcomes
  • 5.3 Using social media in your context and open tools
  • 5.4 Measuring impact
  • 5.5 Over to you
  • 5.6 If you want to know more
  • Acknowledgements

Contents

• Welcome to the course
• Learning outcomes
• How to use the course
• Using the reflective log

This course was developed as part of the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project funded by the Scottish Funding Council, which supports and builds best practice in open education in the Scottish HE, colleges and third sectors. Except for third party materials and where otherwise stated, when individual resources included in this course have other licenses, this course content is made available under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Welcome to the course

• Do you want to know more about how using free and openly licensed materials might develop and enhance your own practice or the practice at your institution or organization?
• Do you use others’ materials to help with your teaching, inspire your own practice or to facilitate learning opportunities for your colleagues or clients?
• Are you interested in how to effectively share your materials and practices with others?

This course, which was produced as part of the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project is aimed at anyone who is curious about how ‘free’ and ‘open’ might change our approach to teaching and learning and has been designed for administrators, educators and facilitators in all sectors. It asks you to consider a range of questions. For example, how do I find open resources and what benefits might they bring? Does openness change our relationship to the content I create, the people I create content for, others with whom I share the material, and our own everyday practice and context? And if so, what impact, if any, does openness have on these practices and relationships?

This course is divided into five sections, each with an accompanying ‘If you want to know more …’ section, which thematically presents supplementary material and resources on the topics for that section. You can use the course in any way that you choose. You can also reuse, reversion and remix this course.

The course begins with the basics of open educational practices (OEP) and open educational resources (OER). Section one of the course explores what ‘open’ means and what open practices and resources are. It also introduces the concept of an ‘open licence’ and what this means. Section two focuses on developing earlier discussions of open educational resources (OER) and explores why one might want to use OER or incorporate more open practices, both as individuals and at an institutional level. In addition, the course looks at the importance of developing both your own, and learners’, digital literacy.

Sections three and four of the course focus on the practicalities of using OER. Section three looks at using OER, where to find open resources, what factors might influence your resource choice, how to attribute a resource and introduces the idea of curation. Building on the introduction to using OER in section three, section four focuses on remixing open resources, what you will need to consider when you create OER, how to share your resources and how to choose the most appropriate licence for your context.

The final section of the course focuses on the importance of measuring the impact of what you create and explores a range of other practices you might want to consider. It also offers a range of different suggestions for ideas you might want to try before encouraging you to build on your work so far in the course to consider where you want to go next in your ‘open’ journey!

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course you should be able to:

• find and identify different open-licensed resources and be able to use them
• create your own OER and understand best practice for incorporating open resources
• plan appropriate practical steps for continuing your own ‘open’ journey.

How to use the course

This course is self-paced and designed to be taken as a ‘whole’. However, you might find that some sections of the course are more relevant for your context than others. If you do not have a facilitator or teacher role, for example, you might want to focus on sections one and two of the course which look at the basics and arguments for using open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP).

Course material has been structured so that there is a range of supplementary material to explore at the end of each section. Course activities make use of a reflective log where you can make notes and develop ideas that will provide the basis for reflecting on ‘where next’ in your open journey at the end of the course and in the future.

Using the reflective log

Many of the activities in Becoming an open educator ask you to make use of a reflective log, a downloadable Word file that contains all the activity questions plus space for you to write your responses and thoughts as you work your way through the course. The log keeps all your ideas and thoughts in one place whilst making it easier to review them at any point. You might also like to use it as evidence of what you have achieved and of your development.

You can download your own copy of the course reflective log. As you work your way through the course you’ll need to make frequent use of it. Save a copy somewhere easy to find and ensure that the filename is something memorable.

1. What Is ‘Open’ Education?

• 1.1 Introduction
• 1.2 What does ‘open’ mean?
• 1.3 Open educational resources and open educational practices
• 1.4 The practice of open educational resources
• 1.5 Open licensing
• 1.6 If you want to know more

1.1 Introduction

This section of the course will look at what meaning ‘open’ might have in different contexts, what makes an educational resource or practice ‘open’ and open licensing.

• What does openness mean and how does it impact on practice?
• What is an ‘open’ educational resource or practice?
• What does an open license look like and what does it do?

Learning Outcomes

• have a better understanding of what makes a practice or resource open
• understand what are the different types of educational resources
• have an awareness of the different types of Creative Commons licences.

1.2 What does ‘open’ mean?

What does it mean to describe an educational practice or educational resource as ‘open’? In part, this depends on the definition of ‘open’ you are using, but it also reflects the context you are working in or referencing. To start thinking about openness, let’s introduce some of the characteristics usually associated with this concept.

Access

Open is often associated with increased access to resources. In particular it is associated with open access and the drive to ‘open up’ academia by publishing research outputs on an open licence. Access to research is increased because resources might not have previously been available and potential users do not need to pay to view or use materials (e.g. resources are not behind a paywall). Increasing access to a resource can also refer to the way a resource is displayed or presented. For more on accessibility see Section 3.5.

Transparency

‘Open’ is often associated with increased transparency, for example in relation to one’s own practices or data. This is particularly the case when one shares data, research and materials with others and by doing so enables public scrutiny of processes, outputs and assertions. For example, making datasets openly available allows others to check for errors, carry out different or the same analyses and ultimately develop and improve research further.

A wide range of government bodies, organisations and foundations support increased or open access to research or data through policy or by funding projects, networks or initiatives that develop open materials or practices. These include the Scottish Funding Council which funds projects such as Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) and Open Scotland which is supported by The University of Edinburgh and other organisations, including OEPS. The Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK (RCUK) have open access publishing policies. Open Knowledge Foundation Scotland is a third-sector organisation that promotes, connects and supports open education initiatives across Scotland.

Free

The term ‘free’ is often used in relation to open educational resources (OER). But what does ‘free’ mean within the context of ‘open’?

As noted above, increasing access to resources often involves removing the need to pay for a resource at the point of use. This type of ‘free’ has been described as ‘gratis’, as the user is not charged a fee to access or use the resource. Any costs associated with a resource’s creation and/or maintenance are absorbed elsewhere, for example by the creator or funder. (OER projects and providers are often supported by philanthropic organisations such as The Hewlett Foundation or the Gates Foundation.)

Another meaning of ‘free’ within the context of openness is ‘libre’. If a resource is ‘libre’ it doesn’t have limitations on the way in which you can use it. Within the context of openness this refers to the potential of openly licensed materials to be reused. However, different licences afford the user different levels of reuse, and some are not considered to be ‘free’ in the ‘libre’ sense. Open licensing is discussed in more detail in Section 1.5. In the meantime, if you are interested in finding out more about the distinction between ‘libre’ and ‘gratis’ and the controversy over open licensing you can read more in ‘Is OER actually open? Gratis vs libre’.

Sharing

In these cases, increasing access to resources through sharing, particularly when material is shared digitally, often means that resources are able to go beyond the original contexts and boundaries intended by their creator.

In Section 1.6 you will find some examples and further reading for each of the above characteristics associated with ‘openness’.

Start of Activity

1.3 Open educational resources and open educational practices

Having thought a bit more about what ‘open’ means, let’s now take a closer look at what is meant by practices and resources that are ‘open’. To start with, let’s focus on a particular kind of resource that will help us make sense of openness in practice: open educational resources (OER).

Educational resources are anything you use to help with your teaching or learning. A video you’ve used in class, a lesson plan, a register, a presentation, a textbook or chapter from a book or a model that you use to illustrate an example … the list is endless!

You might have looked for resources online or in the library to accompany your lessons or a presentation. You might have used an online video or found an image which helps illustrate a point you want to make. Maybe you have searched TES Resources or BBC Bitesize for inspiration when planning your lessons. Often there are copyright restrictions on how you can use resources that you find, but within an educational context you are able to use these due to what is described as ‘fair dealing’ or ‘fair use’.

What makes an educational resource open?

An open educational resource (OER) is a resource that, because of the licence it has, gives you explicit information and permission to reuse the resource without needing to ask the content’s author. The permissions given via an open licence state how you can reuse the resource (e.g. whether the author just needs to be attributed, whether you cannot use it for commercial purposes or whether you can make changes to the material) and how you should attribute it. OER are not necessarily always digital, but those that are made available online, for example via repositories, also give users the ability to remix the resources in situ.

From an author’s perspective, releasing your material as an OER and not requiring potential users to seek your permission for reuse can lead to interesting outcomes. You can find out more about ‘what happened next’ in relation to a variety of OER in Alan Levine’s True Stories of Open Sharing.

However, let’s first explore in a little more depth what is meant by an OER. Defining OER is important, as what is meant by ‘open’ within this context provides a good foundation for thinking about the things that you need to do when creating an OER and how this might change your own practice.

UNESCO defines Open Educational Resources as:

‘… any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OER range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.’

Another way of thinking about what makes an educational resource ‘open’ is to think about what an ‘open’ resource enables you to do with its content/material. David Wiley, a well-known open education advocate describes OER as enabling you to do five things with material: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute. These are also known as the ‘5 Rs’. According to Wiley, facilitating all of the ‘Rs’ enables an educational resource to be described as ‘open’. There are certain considerations that need to be taken into account to make this happen, and these are discussed in more detail later on in the course.

As you can see, just like copyrighted educational resources, OER can be all kinds of different materials you might use in your teaching or learning. OER can be both online and offline and in all kind of formats: many YouTube videos, presentations on Slideshare or photos on Flickr are often openly licensed, whilst whole textbooks in a range of subjects are often openly available (these are called ‘open textbooks’).

Open education

The idea of ‘opening up’, or giving greater access to educational opportunities, is not a new one. Removing barriers to knowledge and increasing access (the process of ‘democratizing knowledge’) can be traced back to the development of the printing press, for example prior to compulsory education being introduced in the late 19th Century (1880 in England and Wales and 1872 in Scotland), philanthropic and charitable endeavors provided educational opportunities to working class children in the form of Ragged Schools and other initiatives.

The term ‘OER’ came into common usage in the early 2000s and has received support from many different individuals and organizations. Read about the types of commitments made by different organizations and individuals in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration from 2007 and the 2012 Paris OER Declaration. The Scottish Open Education Declaration of 2013 broadened the scope of the Paris OER Declaration by focusing on education as a whole.

You might be familiar with the open source movement, which was a forerunner of the OER movement. Open source means that code, software and tools are openly available so that people can improve and build on others’ work, as well as access the tools and software for no cost at the point of use. Examples include Moodle, Drupal, Ubuntu and Linux.

This ethos of community, sharing, increased access and collaboration underpins the open education movement and can be described as an ‘open educational practice’.

What does it mean for an educational practice be ‘open’?

As a range of different practices could be described as ‘open’ and support the use of OER, there is no definitive definition of open educational practices (OEP). However, looking closer at two working definitions of OEP will assist in understanding the difference between OER (open resources of a particular type) and OEP (which is more focused on the context and action to engender the use of OER and the outcomes from doing so).

Building on Conole’s (2010) definition of OEP as ‘…the set of activities and support around the creation, use and repurposing of Open Educational Resources’ and the associated ‘contextual’ dimensions of this, Ehlers and Conole (2010) developed a definition of OEP to reflect both the collaborative aspects of open practice and the reasons why all kinds of people might use OER:

‘Open Educational Practices (OEP) are the use of open educational resources with the aim to improve the quality of educational processes and innovate educational environments.’

Other definitions of OEP are broader and emphasize the social justice elements of openness. For example, the working definition used by the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland project:

We think of Open Educational Practices as those educational practices that are concerned with and promote equity and openness. Our understanding of ‘open’ builds on the freedoms associated with ‘the 5 Rs’ of OER, promoting a broader sense of open, emphasizing social justice, and developing practices that open up opportunities for those distanced from education.

Open education as ‘disruptive’?

Discussion on the rapid ascendency Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) such as Coursera, edX and FutureLearn over the past few years has often been framed within the context of their potential impact on formal education and the narrative of disruption. The idea of ‘disruptive innovation’ originates from Bower and Christensen (1995), and you can read more about this in relation to MOOCs and open education in the JISC CETIS publication MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education. Christensen, Raynor and McDonald (2015) revisit and clarify the idea of disruption in ‘What is disruptive innovation?’.

In responding to such claims about the impact of MOOCs there has also been discussion about how ‘open’ such resources are and determining what the difference is between OER and MOOCs. In answer to the latter question, an OER can, for example, refer to any type of open resource, not just a course. However the ‘openness’ of MOOCs in particular is often in question and MOOCs are often perceived as having a slightly different conception of ‘openness’ than that exemplified by Wiley’s ‘5Rs’. For example, whilst being free to take course or access a resource, you might only be able to view the materials if you sign up. Often MOOC content is not openly licensed, so you won’t be able to remix or reuse the materials used to make up the course.

Similarly, material might only be available for a limited time between the start and end dates of the MOOC and may not be released as OER afterwards. MOOCs are often acknowledged as being ‘open enrollment’ but they may not necessarily be open in terms of their content. However, there are exceptions, for example the Open University’s FutureLearn MOOCs are released on OpenLearn after their final presentation as perpetually open courses (see for example Introduction to cyber security).

1.4 The practice of open educational resources

The next sections of the course will explore open practice as ‘use’ and situate the discussion within the context of finding and reusing open educational resources (OER). However, it is first worth remembering that in order to be able to ‘use’ an OER someone first needs to have shared the material and openly licensed it. Indeed, without sharing something with others it is not possible to widen access to that resource, meaningless to choose to make something free or low cost and impossible to increase transparency, as the material is not accessible. Sharing is therefore an important fundamental enabler or characteristic of ‘openness’ (see Section 1.2).

The cycle of creating, reusing or re-versioning material and then sharing it back is sometimes referred to as a ‘virtuous circle’ (see ‘Sharing and reuse in OER: experiences gained from open reusable learning objects in health’). Research has shown that, although a large number of students and educators use or adapt OER, they do not necessarily share the resources they have created on an open license, nor share back reworked versions of resources they have found (see OER Evidence Report 2013–2014). This course looks at finding and reusing OER in Section 3 and what you need to do to effectively share material in Section 4.

Start of Activity

Now let’s take a look at what enables open practice to take place within the context of OER: open licenses.

1.5 Open licensing

As noted in Section 1.3, UNESCO defines OER as ‘… any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open licence…’. Open licences tell the user who made the material and give clear instructions as to how, and in what context, the creator would like the material reused (making reuse ‘legal’). OER are also made available at no cost to the end user.

There are different types of open licence, but the most common types used for a range of resources are those produced under a Creative Commons (CC) licence. According to Creative Commons, during 2015 over one billion items will have been given Creative Commons licences!

Let’s now take a closer look at the different possible components of a Creative Commons licence and what they mean (Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5 Creative Commons licenses for flipped educators (Creative Commons, CC-BY)

As you can see in the bottom right-hand corner of the infographic above, the different components of licenses can be combined in different ways to create specific licenses with different types of instruction or permissions regarding their reuse (so, for example, the license CC-BY-NC means that you can reuse the resource in any way you like if you attribute the author and do not reuse it for commercial purposes). Visit Creative Commons to read more about what the different license types mean for your practice.

Section 4.4 looks in more depth at what license you should choose when you’re creating an OER and Section 3.4 looks at how to attribute a license correctly.

1.6 If you want to know more

Each If you want to know more … section of the course thematically presents additional material and resources on the topics included in that section of the course.

Understanding open practices and open educational resources

Explore different perspectives on openness in this playlist created by the OER Research Hub or take a look at the ‘Understanding OER in 10 videos’ playlist.

For a more detailed and systematic exploration of ‘openness’ Chapter Two, ‘What sort of open?’ of Martin Weller’s book The Battle for Open is highly recommended. You can download the book for free.

Access

For an in-depth review of the open access movement, its motivations and impact, read this post from opensource.com. The article also highlights a 2012 book about open access by long-time advocate Peter Suber, and you can download a copy and find out more on the MIT press website. See also Peter Suber’s more recent reflections from 2013 in ‘Peter Suber on the state of open access: where are we, what still needs to be done?’

Read through the section on open access publishing and the selected resources in P2PU’s Open Research course or the Public Library of Science (PLOS) on open access. The Jisc is in the process of developing best practice advice for open access. Read ‘Unpicking the open access lock’  for suggestions focused on the HE sector. Creative Commons collates different examples of the impact of open licensing. See in particular examples of social justice.

Transparency

Since 2011, the Open Government Partnership has co-ordinated the international effort to help ‘governments [be] more open, accountable and responsive to citizens’. As of April 2016, there were 69 members of the partnership, including the United Kingdom.

Since 2005, UK Research Councils have required recipients of funding to publish open access, stating that ‘Free and open access to the outputs of publicly funded research offers significant social and economic benefits as well as aiding the development of new research.’

In some countries, greater transparency has had a massive impact on reducing corruption (see ‘Why conduct research in the open?’). This has also helped in disaster situations, see ‘How open map data is helping save lives in Nepal’.

Free

Open textbooks are the type of OER that have gained most traction in the United States due to the high cost of proprietary materials and the potential cost savings for students. Read more about the impact these are having across the USA in this opensource.com blog post: ‘How does your state use open educational resources?’.

In October 2015 it was announced that the Affordable College Textbook Act had been reintroduced for consideration by the United States Congress.

Sharing

Katy Jordan blogged the results of her research on MOOC completion rates. Find out what happened next.

The OER Research Hub is an open research project examining the impact of OER on learning and teaching that shared its methodologies, data and tools in the open. This has enabled others, such as the ROER4D project, which investigates the impact of OER in the Global South, to review and reuse their approach (see ‘Question harmonisation process’); and other researchers to reuse their data (see Robert Schwer’s post ‘Data reports OER research hub’).

Open education

For a quick overview of open education and its benefits, read this overview from the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). You can also see how open education developed on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s (OKF’s) crowdsourced timeline of important events. The OKF has also produced the Open Education Handbook, an invaluable resource that covers many of the topics contained in this course.

For a comprehensive look at recent developments in open education, read John Casey’s article ‘Taking care of business? The political economy of MOOCs and open education. If you’re interested in finding out more about the history of The Open University (UK), browse the History of the OU project blog.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

An opensource.com article charts MOOCs, and their development from being openly licensed and open enrolment to being increasingly non-open in terms of course material.

Another exploration of this dual meaning of ‘open’ comes from Timothy Vollmer on the Creative Commons blog.

Using open educational resources (OER)

The Right to Research Coalition produced a series of ‘Open Access 101’ webcasts for conference participants to introduce people to the concepts of open access, open data and open education. Watch them here.

OER Policy for Europe has produced an OER Mythbusting! resource which helps answer common questions about OER and addresses some of the misconceptions about this type of resource. University College London’s (UCL’s) Why Use OER? also provides a more HE-orientated list of reasons to use OER. You could also look at Commonwealth of Learning’s ‘A basic guide to open educational resources (OER)’ or explore different definitions of OER in this Creative Commons wiki entry: ‘What is OER?’

A number of courses on using and reusing OER are available. These include Commonwealth of Learning’s short course called Understanding Open Educational Resources, the ExplOERer project’s facilitated course Learning to (Re)Use Open Educational Resources and Open Washington’s How to use Open Educational Resources.

Explore the relations between different facets of open knowledge by reading the Open Education Working Group’s Open Data as Open Educational Resources: Case Studies of Emerging Practice (eds. Javiera Atenas and Leo Havermann) or take a closer look at the development of open knowledge by exploring this joint Open Knowledge Foundation and Finnish Institute in London crowdsourced map.

Delve deeper into issues around the term ‘open’ within the context of OER by reading Vivien Rolfe’s blog post for ALT: ‘OER: a languishing teenager?’. Review JISC’s ‘Case studies of OER use’ in Higher Education or read the UKOER/SCORE Review Report – Journeys to Open Educational Practice.

Open licensing

For a concise introduction to Creative Commons licenses read Jane Park’s overview: ‘What is Creative Commons and why does it matter?’ or watch Paul Stacey present an overview of Creative Commons licenses (recorded as part of the BC campus course Adopting Open Textbooks).

If you’re interested in how to look for images that will meet the filter requirements of school PCs, or in devising activities with colleagues to encourage children to explore Creative Commons licensing, find out more in Open Knowledge Foundation’s post by educator Jo Badge.

The DigiLit Leicester project, in partnership with Leicester City Council, has produced a series of resources, including Understanding Open Licensing. Find out more about the project and the project’s other resources.

If you’d like to find out more about how to utilize open licenses, check out examples of Creative Commons license use.

Now go to Section 2 of the course.

2. Why Use Open Practices and Resources?

• 2.1 Introduction
• 2.2 The meaning of ‘open’ in open licensing
• 2.3 Why use open educational resources (OER)?
• 2.4 Why openly license my own materials?
• 2.5 Digital literacies
• 2.6 If you want to know more

2.1 Introduction

This section of the course focuses on the reasons why you should use open educational resources (OERs) or develop ‘open’ practices within your context. You’ll take a closer look at what the ‘open’ aspect of open licensing means and how this impacts on finding and attributing openly licensed materials. You’ll also look at why you might use open educational practices (OEPs) and openly license your own material. This section closes with a look at digital literacy within the context of open educational practices (OEPs) and open educational resources (OERs).

2.2 The meaning of ‘open’ in open licensing

Before looking at some of the reasons you might want to use open educational resources (OERs) or adopt more ‘open’ practices, let’s pause briefly and take another closer look at the concept of ‘open’ within the context of (re)using OER. Copyright is primarily concerned with what you cannot do with material and restrictions on its use, whereas an open license offers the possibility of reuse and remixing without having to seek the creator’s permission or needing to pay a fee for using the material.

Section 1 of the course revealed the variety of characteristics usually associated with ‘openness’ and how people define ‘open’ in different ways. Moreover, in addition to the diversity of contexts that could be described as ‘open’ there are not just open or closed practices, but many different shades of open behaviors or practice: what is described as a ‘continuum of openness’.

Section 1.3 introduced one definition that is commonly referred to when exploring the idea of ‘openness’ within the context of the use and creation of OER: the ‘5 Rs’ that David Wiley, a well-known advocate of open education, has developed (see Figure 2.1). The 5 Rs highlight the benefits and freedoms, rather than restrictions in place, on a resource with an open license:

According to Wiley and this ‘rights’-based framework for understanding what an open license enables you to do, if a resource fulfills all these criteria and therefore is explicit in giving you the ‘right’ to remix, retain, reuse, revise and redistribute a resource, then it can be described as an open educational resource (OER). By and large, open licenses are used to convey relevant information associated with the 5Rs: this is because open licenses such as Creative Commons act as a shorthand to giving permission for reuse, are widely used and easily understood.

As can be inferred from some of the Rs listed above, openness in this context also involves changes to the way you might approach or create material, or collaborate with others. For example, with an OER you are able to circulate or use copies of material without seeking the author’s permission to do so. You can also develop new material based on existing open content under the permissions granted by the original author. In both instances, because an OER should clearly state the reuse criteria, you can save time and money, as you do not need to wait for author permission to reuse a resource and you don’t need to spend time creating your own resource from scratch when someone else has already created something you can reuse or modify for your own purposes.

Creating new resources with OER might enable collaborative experimentation with colleagues, highlight the benefit of sharing resources and good practice, enable iterative improvement to resources, or even highlight social justice by opening up new opportunities for those not currently engaged in, or distanced from, formal education. One example of using open resources to engage with the wider community is Strathclyde University’s widening participation strategy, which ‘aims to remove barriers for under-represented groups to get to university’. More on how this was developed is discussed on the OEPS hub.

However, it’s not just about your ‘right’ to do certain things with material that is openly licensed. Implicit in the idea of the 5Rs and in order for the ‘right’ to remix, reuse, redistribute, revise and retain to be possible, you also need to enable others to do the same (so they have the same ‘rights’ as you) by sharing back your remixed material or original content (in other words, facilitating the ‘virtuous circle’ noted earlier in Section 1.4: The practice of open educational resources).

One component of this is the license. As described in Section 1.5 there are different types of licenses giving different types of permissions for reuse. These different licences can be understood as a ‘continuum of openness’, as some are more liberal in their reuse permissions than others. Figure 2.2 below shows licenses placed along a scale of ‘least free’ to ‘most free’ and correspondingly ‘not OER’ to ‘OER’ (note ‘free’ is understood as ‘libre’ within this context, see Section 1.2 for further explanation.)

If you need reminding of the license types, check out Creative Commons.

Figure 2.2 ‘Finding and using open educational resources (OER): implementing the Creative Commons CC BY license (slide 4)’ (Paul Stacey and Hal Plotkin, CC BY 4.0)

As you can see from Figure 2.2, there are some Creative Commons licensed resources that are not considered to be OER and are described as the ‘least free’ of the open licenses (the CC-BY-ND and CC-BY-SA-NC licenses). This is because these licenses include ‘ND’ or the ‘no-derivatives’ instruction. In other words, when using the resource it can only be used ‘as is’ and not modified in any way. This prohibits any adjustment, changes or building on the resource, either so that it reflects better your own context(s) or to combine it with other OER or materials you have created. Therefore, the ND license fails to fulfill the ‘revise’ and ‘remix’ criteria of Wiley’s 5Rs.

There are arguments for and against using different types of Creative Commons licenses, in particular the NC or ‘non-commercial’ license. In the instance of NC-licensed materials, some people argue that prohibiting commercial use of resources can stifle innovation. US educator and co-author of the open textbook Introductory Statistics, Barbara Illowsky, explains why their textbook is CC-BY:

I wanted to talk about commercial aspects… So one of the interesting comments we have, is how could you not put the NC on your license, how could you agree to a CC-BY because somebody else can take your work and make money. That’s true, but if we didn’t put that BY on there, there wouldn’t be other innovations. So, for example, another college… their bookstore wouldn’t be able to sell the book because they earn a profit on the hard copy of it. WebAssign… Collaborative Statistics was the first Open Ed Resource that they hooked up with to do a homework system with. Before they were working only with major publishers. But when I was starting to present at national conferences, and faculty said I love this book but I would never adopt it because I don’t want to go back to grading homework… The trade-off of a student spending $200 for a book that comes with a homework grading system, or me having to grade homework, they are going to buy the book.

So I approached WebAssign – it’s a fabulous company – but it does cost the students $25. So I tell the students, I recommend it but you don’t have to buy it. If you want to turn in the hard copy paper with your problems worked out to me you can, but I think that the WebAssign has a learning system that goes along with it, they have the videos integrated, they have the books integrated… if you get stuck on a homework problem, it takes you back to the book if you want [etc.]… So I think this is a valuable learning tool, not just making my life easier for grading … now I’ve only had two students who started out turning in a hard copy paper and they eventually ended up buying it. So that’s a company that is doing innovation, but if I had the NC license on it, they wouldn’t.

A more in-depth exploration of the NC license is also available here.

Many national or international organizations that support the use of openly licensed materials argue for the use of the CC-BY license; for example the Wellcome Trust, as this type of license gives ‘much greater use – and therefore impact – of the research we fund and the content we produce.’

Later in the course you will look at developing your own resources and return to look at David Wiley’s 5Rs to help you understand what you need to do to enable others to easily find, use, remix and adapt resources you choose to share.

2.3 Why use open educational resources (OER)?

There are many reasons why people deliberately look for open resources when searching for materials. Resources with open licenses can provide valuable and interesting additional or primary teaching materials, or the basis for a workshop or study group, at low- or no-cost. Within a variety of situations OER can provide content where there was none previously available or replace expensive proprietary material (for example textbooks, where cost savings can be an important motivating factor in OER adoption).

OER can be utilized at short notice and do not require payment or permission for their use. Open materials can often be modified to suit your specific context, so you can create unique resources based on others’ expertise. Some OER are produced by well-known institutions or shared by educators who are experts in their subject. In addition, resources are often peer-reviewed by others online or during their production process, when OER are produced at scale (as in the instance of open textbooks, see OpenStax College for one example).

Whilst the outcomes of using OER are important motivators for their use, there are also potential impacts on educator practice. Some of the possible changes in practice are implicit in in this summary on reasons for using OER produced by Glasgow Caledonian University:

• ‘You can take existing resources and develop them in ways that suit your needs.
• You can develop high quality resources on your own or with a small team of staff.
• You can save time and duplication of effort.
• You can build on best practice by experts in your subject area.
• You can use resources which you may not have the software, equipment or facilities to create yourself.’

Research conducted by the OER Research Hub on the impact of OER found that educators are better able to accommodate diverse student needs and can be more experimental in their teaching approaches. They are not restricted to using specific resources and can develop their own materials from existing resources or find resources that they are not able to create themselves or which have interesting ways of conveying points. Open resources might provide inspiration and ideas when developing one’s own resources or expose one to different practices or approaches.

Using OER and engaging in more open practices can yield a range of institutional benefits. A JISC-funded study supplemental Good Intentions by McGill, Currier, Duncan and Douglas (2008) maps a range of stakeholder aims against different ‘sharing’ strategies, including an ‘open’ option. The open approach was described as having the potential to have ‘significant impact’ on nine out of a possible 15 ‘benefits for educational institutions’ (with ‘possible’ or ‘some’ impact possible in the remaining six areas):

• ‘Maintaining & building on institutional reputation globally
• Attracting new staff and students to institution – recruitment tool for students and prospective employer partners
• Increased transparency and quality of learning materials
• Shares expertise efficiently within institutions
• Encourages high-quality learning & teaching resources
• Supports modular course development
• Supports the altruistic notion that sharing knowledge is in line with academic traditions and a good thing to do
• Likely to encourage review of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment
• Enhancing connections with external stakeholders by making resources visible.’

‘Openness’ therefore has the potential to raise standards, increase engagement and widen participation. For example, OER Hub collaborative research revealed that 32 per cent of learners using The Open University’s OpenLearn platform felt that their use of OER on the site influenced their decision to register for their current course of study (N=934). Research by Wiley, Hilton III, Ellington & Hall (2012) revealed that implementing the use of open resources according to the ‘successful model’ they developed as part of their two-year research study, can offer institutions significant savings when compared with the use of proprietary materials.

Open and Public Domain resources enable you to reuse materials without asking permission as long as you attribute their source and the type of license the resource carries. OER can also change your practice by enabling you to access and rework materials, experiment with them and tailor them to your needs.

However, there are also possible questions and concerns regarding OER use. OER Mythbusting by the OER Policy for Europe project addresses the main concerns, including the quality of resources, compatibility with the curriculum, sustainability and time.

2.4 Why openly license my own materials?

The last section explored some of the reasons to seek out and utilize OER. However, in order to facilitate ‘open’ best practice it is also good to share material you have created too (and therefore complete the ‘virtuous circle’ mentioned in Section 1.4). After all, materials can’t really be called ‘open’ unless they are both shared and when they’re being created they are made as reuseable as possible (e.g. by providing creator information and details of how you would like them to be reused).

There are many reasons for sharing materials. By releasing material on an open license you might increase the visibility and reputation of your work, find new audiences and networks, or receive increased feedback on what you are doing. Often people are altruistically motivated and become involved in different open practices such as openly licensing their own materials and sharing their resources in order to ‘open up’ or increase participation or widen access to otherwise closed environments and information. By widening access to information, knowledge can be shared more effectively, particularly with people who might otherwise be unable to access materials (e.g. for reasons such as cost or geography).

When thinking about whether or not to openly license your work, you might have some reservations. For example:

• Do I have the skills or knowledge to license my material?
• If I blog about my research might someone steal my ideas?
• Are my resources good enough?
• What will my colleagues and students think?
• Am I allowed to release my teaching materials on an open license?
• Do I have the technical and digital skills to create OER?

The sketch note above (which was produced as part of a visual recording of Josie Fraser’s keynote at OEPS Forum 4) shows the results of an ‘ask the audience’ exercise. Josie asked the audience to respond to commonly heard reasons educators give for not using or sharing materials in the open.

Whilst using or incorporating OER into your own practice might not always be visible or impact on others in an obvious way, becoming more open in your practice and sharing your material or resources openly may lead to unanticipated changes to your current practice. You might develop different working strategies, take a different approach to designing the materials themselves or collaborate differently with colleagues if you choose to co-develop openly licensed materials. Letting colleagues and students know that you are using an open resource and explaining what it means can also raise awareness and open up discussions around ‘open’.

Your own, your institution and/or organization’s approaches to sharing and openness will also have an impact on how you move toward more open ways of practice. Experimenting with releasing images you have created in your own time (for example, holiday photos) openly on Flickr is a great place to start. Depending on your institution’s approach and view of open practices, openly licensing your course materials or resources created in work time might be a more complex matter, particularly in relation to intellectual property and ownership of the resource. To resolve copyright issues, some Scottish Universities, including the University of Edinburgh and Glasgow Caledonian University, have introduced policies to encourage their students and educators to release material in the open.

2.5 Digital literacies

Changes in how information is shared, whilst dependent on who has control of the mode and means of dissemination, can enable increased access to information. The development of the Internet, in tandem with increased access to, and development of, technology to access the web, has enabled people to find, share and exchange information beyond national boundaries. For example, European Commission research in early 2016 revealed that ‘95% of 16–24 year olds in the EU are regular Internet users’. With access to technology and the knowledge of where to find resources, open education has made materials more accessible and can potentially widen access and participation.

Yet could these ‘95% of “regular Internet users” ’ be described as digitally literate? In other words, do people have the confidence and knowledge to find, appraise and use the resources they find online? Although students and learners may be using the Internet, their levels of digital literacy are likely to differ. Subsequently, this may affect their ability to engage with the increasing amount of educational material that is now available and accessible online, and which can be accessed, reused and studied in both informal and formal contexts by people who may be studying or facilitating learning or just simply interested in finding out more about a particular topic. JISC’s (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee) ‘quick guide’ ‘Developing students’ digital literacy’ provides a good overview of ‘next steps’ for thinking about developing learners’ digital literacies and the reasons why this is an important consideration. JISC also provides top tips for different groups of users and a wide range of resources to help understand and develop digital skills across institutions and organizations.

Digitization can reduce individual transaction costs and enable information to be shared easily between interested parties, for example, paywalled research articles or downloaded materials are often shared, in spite of restrictions such as publisher agreements or the mechanism for sharing the material in the first place, e.g. virtual learning environments (VLEs). The possibility for learning outside an institution is potentially increased if one knows where to find materials and resources. There are even examples of people crafting their own curricula through OER and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

The channels by which students can find information have also increased. In addition to asking fellow students or their teacher, going to the library or using a hard copy encyclopedia or printed resources to find out information, learners today use search engines, most likely Google, or Wikipedia to find out more about a topic. Research by Head & Eisenberg (2010) conducted with US college students revealed ‘over half of the survey respondents (52 per cent) were frequent Wikipedia users [during their course] – even if an instructor advised against it’, with a further 22 per cent reporting using the open, crowdsourced encyclopedia ‘occasionally’.

The availability of information and learning resources can be seen as a challenge to, or conversely, an opportunity for, formal learning. After all, the two are not mutually exclusive. What if educators were to incorporate and use online platforms and materials into their lessons, or to encourage students to critically assess material on (rather than ban the use of) platforms such as Wikipedia, share and develop ideas online and utilise YouTube, Twitter and other platforms? Rather than prohibiting the use of resources such as Wikipedia, there is arguably the opportunity to develop learners’ digital literacy skills as part of embracing openness in education.

For an example of how an educator helped to develop learners’ digital literacy skills read how Natalie Lafferty, Head of the Centre for Technology and Innovation in Learning at Dundee University enabled students to become co-creators of OER.

2.6 If you want to know more

Each If you want to know more … section of the course thematically presents additional material and resources on the topics for that section of the course.

The ‘open’ in open licensing

If you’re interested in exploring the ‘continuum of openness’ and what this means in practical terms, read Hilton III, Wiley, Stein & Johnson’s The Four R’s of Openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources.

Benefits and challenges of open educational resources

If you’re interested in taking a closer look at the wide range of reasons for using OER or engaging in OEP, there is a range of research available, including the UKOER Synthesis & Evaluation report, which has a section on motivations. This section of the report explores the idea that reasons for engaging in OEP/OER can be categorized by stakeholder group. The OER Impact Study: Research Report by Liz Masterman and Joanna Wild looks at reasons for using OER within the UK’s HE sector.

Take a closer look at some of the benefits and challenges of OER in this series of posts:

• ‘Benefits and challenges of OER for higher education institutions’ (Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams).
• ‘The financial benefits of OER’ (Rob Farrow).
• Watch ‘Open education matters: why is it important to share content?’
• The OER Research Hub has researched some of the challenges for people using OER. Read their 2013–2014 report.

If you’re interested in the potential issues with regard to sharing openly licensed resources, these posts might be of interest:

• ‘The danger of using Creative Commons Flickr photos in presentations’.
• ‘Koppie Koppie sells photos of your kids to prove you shouldn’t post them online’.
• ‘Flickr is about to sell off your Creative Commons photos’.

OER policies

Leeds University’s OER policy (which has been used as a basis for, or reviewed, by other institutions such as Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Edinburgh as part of their own development of an OER policy) and The Open University (UK)’s open educational media operating policy are useful to review.

Digital literacy

Read ‘Focus on data literacies and ICT proficiency: the importance of digital capabilities’, which highlights the need for ‘training and support’ in preventing incidents such as that which occurred in September 2015, when a London clinic accidentally released via email personal information of HIV positive patients and other patients visiting an HIV drop-in facility.

In ‘The death of the digital native: four provocations from Digifest speaker, Donna Lanclos’, the author begins her provocations by arguing that it’s a ‘dangerous assumption’ to consider learners inherently digitally savvy.

If you are interested in improving your digital literacy skills, you can participate in the badged OpenLearn course Succeeding in a digital world.

Now go to Section 3 of the course.

3. Using Open Educational Resources

• 3.1 Introduction
• 3.2 Where can I find OER?
• 3.3 Choosing a resource
• 3.4 Attributing a resource
• 3.5 Curating OER
• 3.6 If you want to know more

3.1 Introduction

This section of the course focuses on where you can find open resources, what factors might influence your choice, how to attribute a resource and the importance of how you remix to provide the best possible experience for learners.

3.2 Where can I find OER?

Open educational resources (OER) can be found in many places, but it is not always immediately obvious where to find material that gives you explicit permission to reuse it or how to find the most relevant material for your context. Some of the more familiar places to find resources, such as Flickr, YouTube or Google, include filters so that you can show only openly licensed images or videos.

For example, when you are searching for an image on Google you can choose to see images with specific types of permissions for their reuse. To do this, once you have searched for a particular image, go to the ‘Search tools’ tab and choose ‘Labeled for reuse’ before selecting what type of license you would like to see.

Figure 3.1 ‘Google search by license’ (Beck Pitt, CC-BY), based on a search of www.google.co.uk

However, you can also see what kind of license an individual video carries. As you can tell from the licensing information provided in Figure 3, this video is available for reuse can be edited and remixed on YouTube.

There are two ways to find openly licensed videos on YouTube. When searching for videos you can choose to add a range of different ‘filters’, and this includes ‘Creative Commons’ as a ‘Feature’ of the type of video you are seeking.

Figure 3.2 ‘YouTube filters’ (Beck Pitt, CC-BY), based on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxi78MxbdX0

However, you can also see what kind of license an individual video carries. As you can tell from the licensing information provided in Figure 3, this video is available for reuse can be edited and remixed on YouTube.

Figure 3.3 ‘YouTube licensing’ (Beck Pitt, CC-BY), based on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxi78MxbdX0

You can find more detailed instructions on how to find OER on Google and YouTube and other platforms in this presentation by the ROER4D project: ‘How and where to find OER’ or by looking at Glasgow Caledonian University’s guide to finding Creative Commons licensed images.

There are also specific repositories that only contain OER. Whilst JORUM, the UK-based repository for sharing OER across all sectors is no longer maintained, other collections are available, such as the College Development Network’s site. OpenCNX (formerly Connexions) is a repository of OER where learners and educators can share and remix materials. The OER Quality project has created and crowdsourced a list of repositories around the world, and members of their project have been involved in creating a map of repositories.

You could also explore searchable and curated spaces offered by OER Commons or the European Commission’s Open Education Europa portal.

Sometimes it can be difficult to find the resource you need for your own learning, or to help others. In the instance of OpenLearn, The Open University’s OER repository teams in Scotland and Wales have created themed ‘learning pathways’ to help learners navigate their way through materials, develop their interest in a particular area and build their confidence, whilst introducing them to higher education (HE) study. You can read more about how the Pathways program was developed in Scotland and Wales. Helping learners navigate their way through materials is an important factor in enabling effective learning, and Section 3.5 on curation will look at this in more depth.

3.3 Choosing a resource

The last section gave suggestions for how and where to find content. If you are facilitating learning, looking for inspiration, putting together a reading list, encouraging learners to engage in independent study, rewriting a course or simply looking for inspiration, these factors will influence your choice. You will also be thinking about the type of learners you have, their context and desired learning outcomes.

In addition to sites such as YouTube, that offer both openly licensed and non-openly licensed materials, some websites offer openly available materials that are not openly licensed. For example, the BBC-hosted website BBC Learning has lots of useful resources, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from providers such as FutureLearn or MITx provide whole courses that might be useful and which anyone can sign up to. As resources from these sites are not necessarily openly licensed, you will need to check before reusing them.

When you are choosing an open resource, quality might initially be a concern. MOOC platforms and curated content sites are often part of an organization’s public engagement strategy, and institutions ensure that their courses are developed in accordance with defined quality criteria. Examples include The Open University’s OpenLearn, The University of Edinburgh’s OpenEd and The University of Nottingham’s U Now. These can be good places to start looking for open content. To help other users and provide feedback to the resource’s creator, some platforms enable you to ‘rate’ a resource or comment on it.

Yet what does ‘quality’ mean to you when you’re planning to adapt something to your own context? As David Wiley argues in his post ‘Stop saying “high quality”’, references to quality when discussing OER often ignore the critical point that:

‘…the core issue in determining the quality of any educational resource is the degree to which it supports learning.’

In other words, your choice of a resource will take into account the needs of the learners and relevance to the objectives of the activity, course or learning journey.

3.4 Attributing a resource

In Section 3.2 you searched for openly licensed materials that you might want to incorporate or use in your everyday practice. You also identified the resource’s license and what this means for how you can reuse the resource. The next stage is to look at how to attribute the resource when you are reusing it within your own context. This is good practice for two reasons: not only to ensure that you have appropriately accredited the authorship and license of the original material, but also so that people using or reviewing the resource you have created are able to reuse the material in their own context.

A quick and easy way to remember what information you need to include when reusing resources is by remembering an acronym: TASL. This stands for Title, Author, Source, License. TASL tells you what you need to include to ensure that you are appropriately acknowledging the source of the OER that you are using.

Figure 3.8 ‘Pink rose birthday cake’ (Rexness, CC BY-SA 2.0), screenshot created by Beck Pitt

Let’s illustrate this with an example. If you follow this link to Flickr you can find the above picture of a cake, which was found using a Google search and filtering images for ‘labeled for reuse’ (see Section 3.2 for more on how to do this), and has been uploaded to Flickr by its creator. How will we correctly license this resource using TASL?

Figure 3.9 ‘Flickr resource information’ (Rexness, CC BY-SA 2.0), screenshot created by Beck Pitt

First, what is the resource’s title? In this instance it is labeled as ‘Pink rose birthday cake.’ So that others can see the origin of the resource we also need to provide the URL (https://www.flickr.com/photos/rexness/5920122416/in/gallery-123856341) of the page on Flickr where the image is hosted.

Who created the resource? The author or creator of the cake photo is Rexness. We can view Rexness’s Flickr profile by clicking on his name and clicking on the dropdown menu labeled ‘More’ on the right-hand side of the page and choosing ‘Profile’. This reveals further information about Rexness and we will use this URL as part of our attribution.

What is the source of the resource? In this instance the source of the image is the same as the URL we are using for the resource’s title.

What license does the image have? To see an image’s license information on Flickr, click on the ‘Some rights reserved’ text below the date the image was created. This reveals that the image ‘Pink rose birthday cake’ has been licensed CC BY-SA 2.0 by Rexness. We are also redirected to Creative Commons license information automatically. This is the URL we need to include so that others can find out the correct license information.

So what does the final attribution look like?

‘Pink rose birthday cake’ by Rexness is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

For further advice on attribution, consult the Creative Commons Wiki guidelines on best practice for attribution and Glasgow Caledonian University’s guide to Reusing Content for more advice and examples.

When you decide to use an open resource that someone has provided, it is also good practice, where possible, to let the creator of the resource know how you have reused it (for example via the comments section on the relevant webpage etc.). In instances where the author has listed the license but not explicitly linked to the relevant license deed, you should provide an explicit link to the license when reusing.

One issue for creators of OER is how to measure the impact of the resources they openly license: once ‘in the wild’ or freely available, it is extremely difficult to track how and in what contexts they are reused. You can read more about tracking the impact of resources in Section 4.6.

3.5 Curating OER

The notion of the teacher or facilitator as curator is helpful when working with open and online resources (Siemens, 2007) and reflects the possibility of education moving away from the ‘transmission’ of knowledge from teacher to learner, to a more constructivist approach which acknowledges the value of education created by the learner. Earlier in this section of the course we focused on one aspect of the curation process: choosing OER and what factors are important to you when selecting resources.

When using OER it is important to consider how you will integrate material into the learning process, particularly if you are blending together material that has been used in different situations (e.g. online or face-to-face). You will need a clear structure with guidance on outcomes, sequencing and, (where appropriate), you might want to consider including opportunities to collaborate with fellow learners. For example, providing your learners with a set of URLs to useful resources, however relevant and interesting, will not necessarily give sufficient context or information on why the learner should read further. You might want to consider introducing peer support (again, where appropriate), and study groups might be one option for bringing people together to discuss course materials.

Even if your learners are confident and have advanced digital literacy skills, without the OER being integrated into a broader framework or by providing support to navigate materials, it might be difficult to follow and engage with the content as a whole. Ensuring that any open resources you choose to utilise are smoothly mixed together is an important element of good open educational practice. In addition, you might want to encourage students to create OER as part of their studies (see Section 2.5) or work with students to rewrite course material or textbooks. As Natalie Lafferty of Dundee University noted in an interview published in February 2016, if you plan to incorporate learning activities that involve students in creating digital assets, it’s important to ensure that there is appropriate advice, information and support to get started. The next section of the course will take a closer look at curation as ‘remix.’

3.6 If you want to know more

Each If you want to know more … section of the course thematically presents additional material and resources on the topics for that section of the course.

Understanding open practices and open educational resources

The DigiLit project at Leicester City Council in the UK has produced a series of guides to help educators, particularly those teaching in the compulsory education sector, to understand and use OER. These include G1 Open Education and the Schools Sector and G2 Understanding Open Licensing for more information on open licensing and what OER is.

If you’d like to spend a bit more time looking at Creative Commons licensing and how to use them, you can participate in a free open online course at Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) called Get CC Savvy. P2PU also run courses called Open Detective and Intro to Openness in Education that will help you understand different types of openly licensed material.

If you’re interested in looking in more detail at different license types (including those for open source software), it’s worth looking at this comparison of free and open-source software licenses or reading more about open source licensing.

To find out more about connectivism, read George Siemen’s ‘Connectivism – a learning theory for the digital age’ (2005) or watch ‘10 minute lecture – George Siemens – curational teaching’

Using open educational resources

Here are some more ideas for where to look for openly licensed resources:

JiSC’s Digital Media Guide, ‘Finding video, audio and images online’.

An Open Education Working Group blog post ‘Illustrating open education’ (by Marieke Guy) has a useful list of places to look for openly licensed content.

You can search for OER by subject or look at specific subject repositories. The Royal Geographical Society highlights a number of sources for OER in geography, for example.

Read more about how the OER Assistant is helping educators find OER according to learning objectives.

There are some useful guides to developing online teaching and learning available, including:

ORBIT: The Open Resource Bank for Interactive Teaching.

University of Leicester’s ‘Writing and structuring online learning materials’.

Now go to Section 4 of the course.

4. How to Create and Share Open Educational Resources

• 4.1 Introduction
• 4.2 Remixing OER
• 4.3 What do I need to consider when creating or remixing an OER?
• 4.4 What license should I choose?
• 4.5 How can I share my resources with others?
• 4.6 If you want to know more

4.1 Introduction

This section of the course will look at how you can create your own open resource, including what is meant by ‘remixing’ open materials, what to consider when creating your own open resource, how to choose a license and ways you could share your OER.

4.2 Remixing OER

So far the course has looked at what characterises an open educational resource (OER) and how to find, identify and reuse open materials ‘as is’. Yet, as you have already seen in previous sections, some open licences also enable us to change, improve and develop OER to make them more appropriate for your own context and purposes (this is called ‘localisation’). You could, for example, build a new course out of existing tried-and-tested content, or make changes to open content and/or combine them to create a new resource. This is often described as ‘remixing’ content (see Section 1.6 on Wiley’s 5Rs and Creative Commons). In Free to Mix: An educator’s guide to reusing digital content, the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa summarises remixing as:

‘Remix can refer to any sampling and overlaying of print, music, video and images

Collage, photomontage and documentaries are early forms of remix

Remix requires similar skills to traditional literacy, only using multiple forms of media content

Creating, quoting and referencing for multiple media content are similar to printed content. Both involve convention and law.’

How to remix materials

Some examples and ideas of how to remix materials include:

Adding text to a diagram or picture you are reusing.

Taking several different open resources and adding your own commentary or narrative to create a new resource.

Taking an existing textbook and remixing it or working with others to remix it. You could even make collaborative remixing a learning activity that helps demonstrate the fundamentals or a particular aspect of what you teach. For example, David Wiley’s students improved, rewrote and extended their existing open textbook on project management, as part of practically demonstrating their new project management skills. Read David’s blog post ‘The best OER revise/remix ever?’ to find out more.

Swapping examples in a resource for ones that are more relevant to your own context.

Adding narrative and additional material to existing open video footage to make them more applicable to your own context and demonstrate differences in practice. Read Igor Lesko’s article on how videos were repurposed for different contexts in ‘Examples of OER in health remixes from the African Health OER Network’.

If you want more ideas or suggestions for how to remix, The Daring Librarian (aka Gwyneth Jones) reviews well-known popular culture remixes and spin-offs, how to remix and ways to use social media as part of ‘project based learning’ in ‘Secrets of the remix, mash-up, YouTube generation’.

Authoring tools

There is a range of user-friendly authoring tools that can assist with remixing content. Examples of OER remixing and authoring platforms include:

OERPUB

Pressbooks

OpenStax CNX

OER Commons.

Choosing a license

When remixing different OER it is important to pay attention both to the license of the material you are going to reuse, as this may restrict how you can reuse it and how differently licensed materials affect what license you are able to give the new resource you create. It is also important to keep track of what resources you are using. One method of noting the details of resources is to create an asset log, where you document the source URL, the resource’s license information and the way the author wants to be attributed (see TASL in Section 3.4). You will need to include all this information as part of your new resource.

You might want to include material in your new resource that is licensed on a less ‘open’ license than the rest of the content you are using. In these instances it is useful to remember that you can always link out to more restrictively licensed materials (e.g. by providing a link in your remix to the original resource rather than embedding it within your new creation). You can then summarize the resource so that it’s contextualized within your remix and the learner has sufficient information to know why the material is of relevance and how it fits with what precedes and follows it.

Let’s begin by looking at what kinds of materials you can adapt or remix. Creative Commons has provided some great resources to help you understand what you can and can’t do with differently licensed materials. Table 1 below tells you whether one CC or Public Domain resource can be remixed with another: ‘To use the chart, find a license on the left column and on the top right row. If there is a check mark in the box where that row and column intersect, then the works can be remixed. If there is an ‘X’ in the box, then the works may not be remixed unless an exception or limitation applies.’

If you need reminding of the license types, check out Creative Commons.

Table 1 Table showing which license types can be remixed with each other from Frequently Asked Questions by Creative Commons and licensed CC BY 4.0

Let’s take a closer look at a few examples. As seen in Section 2.5, one of the most restrictive Creative Commons licenses you can apply contains the ‘no derivatives’ (ND) instruction: CC-BY-ND or CC-BY-NC-ND. Look at Table 1 above; as you can see all the rows that contain a license that includes a ‘no derivatives’ instruction cannot be combined or remixed with other licenses. These licenses are not considered to be OER (see Section 2.2), although you can use the resource ‘as is’ with attribution and in the instance of a resource labelled CC-BY-ND, for commercial purposes.

License combinations

But what about the other license combinations? Let’s look at a CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-SA combination. Why can you not remix material that is for non-commercial use with another resource that is Share-alike (SA)? This is because adding a non-commercial condition conflicts with the Share-alike (SA) instruction of the CC-BY-SA license. The Share-alike requires you to share a remix of the resource on the same license (in this instance as CC-BY-SA) or a license where the terms do not conflict with the Share-alike restriction (e.g. if the other material is Public Domain or CC-BY licensed). Share-alike also enables some non-Creative Commons openly licensed materials to be remixed with CC licensed works.

Now that you are able to identify what types of material can be licensed with other differently licensed types of materials, it is important to ensure that you license any new material correctly. Table 2 below comes from a brief guide to remixing differently licensed content from Creative Commons and gives a quick overview of different licenses, in addition to explaining why and how you can remix different types of Creative Commons licensed materials.

Reading the table from the left-hand column, those marked green/with a tick can be licensed using the adapter’s license indicated across the top row. Those marked yellow/’not recommended’ are technically permitted, but not recommended by Creative Commons. Those marked grey/with a cross are not permitted.

Table 2 ‘Adapter’s license chart’ by Creative Commons and licensed CC BY 4.0.

As emphasized in the CC document, and seen in the overview above, you cannot give a less restrictive license to material that was originally licensed more restrictively, for example you cannot give a new resource a CC-BY license if the material you are incorporating was originally licensed CC-BY-SA.

Both tables 1 and 2 clearly show the impact of licensing your own material CC-BY: this gives the biggest potential for the resource to be reused in different contexts. As seen earlier, licensing material with the ND license means that no one can create a new version of your work or remix it. This has implications for practice: if someone wanted to change some of your examples, to make them more pertinent to their own context, this would not be allowed under the ND license.

4.3 What do I need to consider when creating or remixing an OER?

You’ve looked at a range of OEP, locating and attributing an OER, and using and curating and reusing others’ materials to create a new OER but what about when you have material that you’ve created and you want to openly license it? Earlier the course looked at reasons educators might openly license their resources. The following sections of the course will look at how to openly license your work. However, beforehand, there are a few key questions to consider before you give a resource an open license.

Is it appropriate to go open?

Depending on what type of material you are thinking about openly licensing, you need to consider whether it is appropriate to apply an open license to a resource you’ve created. Issues of confidentiality and lack of control over reuse might be a concern, particularly if you are encouraging students to work in the ‘open’ or are involved in research. Or perhaps you are concerned about how your resource or material might be reused: what happens if someone reuses your work within a context that you find offensive? Have you any grounds for redress?

As mentioned earlier, once a resource is ‘in the wild’ and available for download/reuse under open license terms, it is very difficult to track its reuse, as people may retain copies of the material. This is why you cannot retract an open license; your only recourse is to remove the original resource so that nobody else can reuse it.

With regard to reusing material in contexts that the creator does not support, CC has a number of guidelines and suggestions on how to approach this issue, should it arise, as you are not necessarily endorsing reuse of your material. Read the Creative Commons guidelines ‘Considerations for licensors and licensees’ and ‘Frequently asked questions’ for more on these questions and more general considerations before openly licensing material.

Copyright or Intellectual Property

Once you have decided that you want to openly license a resource it is important to first ascertain whether the resource(s) or materials you intend to license actually belong to you or whether you need to seek permission to openly license the resource you want to include. For example, if you create material at work is it considered to belong to your place of work or you? In other words, who owns the intellectual property (IP)?

Ultimately, and because of the different and varied rules at different organizations and institutions, the best approach is to seek expert advice and consult with an appropriate person at your institution or place of work regarding the rights and intellectual property (IP) of materials you create at work. See the further reading section of the OEPS course for resources on these topics and Section 2.4 for examples of institutional open licensing policies.

Facilitating reuse of your OER

Are you happy to go ahead and openly license that resource and sure that you hold the copyright? That is great! However, before you start thinking about what kind of license you want to apply to your material, it’s worth taking time to think about how best you can facilitate reuse of the resource. To create a resource that can be easily found, reused and remixed can involve more than just openly licensing the material and ensuring that the open license will ‘travel’ with the resource.

David Wiley’s 5Rs which highlighted characteristics of OER (see also Section 2.5) are useful to consider when thinking about best practice for sharing OER and how one can best facilitate ‘openness’ and make it easier for people to use OER. For example, how can you help facilitate the redistribution of the resource you create? Or how do you ensure that an OER can be remixed or reused? Moreover, how can you facilitate ‘ownership’ of a resource (the ‘retain’ of the 5Rs)? Take a look back at the matrix in Section 4.2 to consider how the material you choose to remix impacts on this.

In part this depends on what type of material you are openly licensing. If you share material online, how can you make it visible so that others can find it and easily determine that it meets their needs? For larger resources (e.g. courses) you will also need to make it easy for others to find specific content within the resource that they might want to reuse by providing an overview or summary. Think about how you can make your resource accessible to others, for example by providing it in different formats or by adding a transcript to a video?

It is useful, and often saves time, to address this type of question at the time of producing a resource (if you are making a resource from scratch or remixing/including OER in a new resource). To help make your resource visible and to facilitate reuse, here are some things to consider:

Inclusion of clear licensing and creator information within the resource itself and when you label the resource. This helps people to know who created the resource and how they would like it used. Remember that given the resource is ‘open’, if possible you want to provide this information in a way that will ‘travel’ with the resource as it is reused. If you have used others’ material this might limit how you can license your own resource (see Section 3.3) and you will need to ensure that you have included appropriate attribution in your own resource (for example with the material itself or in an acknowledgements section in your OER).

Appropriate metadata (labelling or description, e.g. tagging) will help people find your resource. How can you make your resource stand out? Find out more about metadata.

If appropriate, learning outcomes and a summary of what topics are covered by a resource can be useful to help people find material and decide if what you have created is right for them to reuse. What information do you look for when you are searching for documents or resources? Remember, not everyone has time to review documents in detail before deciding whether or not to download them.

What format(s) will you provide your resource in to make it easier for others to use and reuse? Can the resource be provided in a variety of formats? It is difficult to remix material that is in PDF format. It is also important to consider that not everyone has access to what might be considered ‘common’ software packages. Find out more in this guide: ‘FOSS open standards/comparison of file formats’.

How can you make your resource accessible to others and where will it be hosted? It is important to ensure that as many people as possible can use your resource. Your institution or organization may already have guidelines on accessibility. If not, you might want to review The Open University’s accessibility guidelines or read more about accessibility and OER in Section 4.6.

Ideally, in order to fulfill the practice of 5Rs, you want to make sure your resource is easy to find and use, has clear instructions on how to reuse it and its copyright (the open license), in addition to giving some kind of overview and tagging to indicate what the resource includes (if appropriate). If possible, providing your resource in a few formats will also help facilitate reuse.

4.4 What license should I choose?

Earlier sections of the course covered some considerations and issues that might arise when thinking about whether to openly license your material. As seen earlier, some institutions and organizations advocate the licensing of materials as CC-BY to facilitate reuse or have developed clear guidelines on intellectual property (IP) and copyright, which may or may not stipulate use of a specific license. More generally, licensing some material on restrictive open licenses such as the non-derivative (ND) CC license means that people can reuse the material ‘as is’ but not remix it. Similarly, a non-commercial (NC) license means that the resource should not be reused within a commercial/for-profit context. However this arguably inhibits some types of reuse (see Section 2.2).

The last section briefly looked at some of the concerns you might have regarding openly licensing your material and where to go for advice on your questions and concerns. However, once you are happy to openly license your resource, the next stage is to choose the most appropriate license. The section ‘The right license for the job’ from the Get CC Savvy course on Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) guides you through the main considerations. The course also includes the Creative Commons step-by-step chart to guide you through what you need to consider when choosing an open license. Section 4.6 also includes advice on best practice when licensing specific types of resource (e.g. images, videos).

4.5 How can I share my resources with others?

So far this course has considered how to create an open resource and which open licence would be most appropriate. But although open resources are not necessarily available online or in digital format, it is important to think about how to share the resource appropriately to facilitate reuse.

If your resource is for a particular subject, you might want to share it back on an appropriate subject-orientated repository. Or if you take a photo or other resource from a website, let the author know how you reused it by commenting on it and providing a URL. If you remixed a resource using existing content, you might want to share it back to the same site as you found the original resource upon which it is based.

Section 3.2 looked at different places to find OER. Many of these repositories and sites are also places to share your open materials, or enable you to openly license your content as part of the upload process (e.g. YouTube and Flickr). For example:

Humbox (humanities materials)

OpenLearn Works

Open Library of the Humanities.

Many repositories such as OpenStax CNX (formerly Connexions) and OpenLearn Works have been developed so that they showcase not only the original resource but also additional assets or modified versions of original course materials that have been created by others. This enables you to see how a resource has developed, as well as potentially saving time by being able to reuse a version that may be more appropriate for your own setting than the original. Concise information so that people can review your resource quickly and a less restrictive license that enables creative reuse help to facilitate this process.

In some instances, sharing materials has resulted in communities being developed around a resource, with people contributing add-on materials to a core resource. One good example of this is the open textbook Introductory Statistics, which one of its co-authors, Barbara Illowsky, described as becoming a ‘community’ resource, as so many people using it have contributed suggestions, additional examples and test banks, etc., to it. You can read more about the textbook and the backstory to its creation in this interview.

Other open textbooks have been collaboratively created, for example by using the ‘sprint’ method, where colleagues in the Canadian province of British Columbia created a Geography textbook during a period of four days as part of their Open Textbook project. The educational technology organization Siyavula in South Africa adopted a similar approach when creating materials.

4.6 If you want to know more

Each If you want to know more … section of the course thematically presents additional material and resources on the topics for that section of the course.

Understanding open practices and open educational resources

Watch these two videos, produced by the Orange Grove Repository, which explain how to find and remix OER: ‘Creating OER and combining licenses – full’ (part one) and ‘Creating OER and combining licenses part 2’ (part two). Part two of the video in particular takes a look at more ‘restrictive’ licenses such as the non-derivative license (ND), which does not allow remixing of material.

Here are a range of resources that explore some of the best practices, issues and challenges concerning the creation and remixing of OER around the world:

OER: An Asian Perspective brings together a range of case studies on the varied use of OER across Asia.

To find out more about what has been happening by geographical location take a look at Creative Commons (CCs) country-by-country list of ‘the most compelling OER projects and implementations of CC’.

Where OER was created, the implications of a resource’s origin and the need for reversioning or ‘localizing’ material for different contexts is discussed in depth in: ‘The role of OER localisation in building a knowledge partnership for development: the TESSA and TESS-India teacher education projects’ (Buckler, A. Perryman, L-A. Seal, T. & Musafir, S. (2014).

‘Cultural issues in the sharing and re-use of resources for learning’ (Littlejohn, A & Margaryan, A. 2006) takes a closer look at barriers and solutions to reuse.

Using, reusing and remixing open educational resources

Here are some resources to help answer questions you might have about openly licensing your own material:

The Creative Commons wiki on ‘Considerations for licensors and licensees’ provides an in-depth overview of what you need to think about when openly licensing a resource or using OER.

The Creative Commons wiki FAQ provides useful background reading on Creative Commons as an organization and also general information on using CC materials and licenses.

Browse New Media Rights ‘Legal and how-to guides for independent creators, internet users, nonprofits and small businesses’ for advice on creating online media.

If you are based in the UK, it is worth familiarizing yourself with the UK government guidelines in ‘Exceptions to copyright’.

Here are some resources to help you remix differently open licensed resources:

Some OER repositories provide users with the ability to remix material directly on their platform, for example ‘Creating a remix on OER Commons’.

The Open Education Handbook lists a range of tools that you could use to remix OER, including repositories such as OpenStax CNX, see ‘Editor tools for building and remixing OERs’.

Test your understanding of different license combinations and play David Wiley’s OER Remix Game.

Although written for the New Zealand context, this Digital New Zealand Mix and Mash guide is a great resource and contains information on the history of remix and copyright, why acknowledging your sources matters, ways to discuss remix with your students, places to look for different types of OER and how to remix photos and create infographics. Read more about the background to this document and check out lesson plans for teaching CC to students in ‘Copyright, Creative Commons & mix & mash: lesson plan’.

The STEM OER Guidance Wiki brings together a range of documents regarding the creation, use and sharing of OER from HEA/Jisc OER projects.

Further resources and articles you might want to explore:

If you’re interested in exploring the facilitation and possibility of remix and, by extension, mash-ups, read ‘Dr. Mashup or, why educators should learn to stop worrying and love the remix’ by Brian Lamb.

Find out more about the rationale and outcomes of OER remix in ‘An OER online course remixing experience’ (Mallison, B.J & Krull, G. E.) OpenPraxis, 2015, 7 (3).

Now go to Section 5 of the course.

5. Putting Open into Practice

• 5.1 Introduction
• 5.2 Sharing processes and outcomes
• 5.3 Using social media in your context and open tools
• 5.4 Measuring impact
• 5.5 Over to you
• 5.6 If you want to know more
• Acknowledgements

5.1 Introduction

This section of the course takes a closer look at a range of open practices, why and how you might want to consider measuring the impact of the resources you create or use, and suggests some ideas for next steps in developing your own practice.

5.2 Sharing processes and outcomes

Earlier in this course you looked at different interpretations, or characteristics, of ‘openness.’ Openness can refer to how one does something (in other words the processes or tools that are used) and the outputs produced, but it always takes place within a specific context.

Sharing methodologies, data, practices, ideas and processes

Creating OER involves sharing resources you have created, but what about sharing the progress of a project, idea, research or sharing data?

For example, you may work on a project. How do you let others know about the project’s progress and share outputs? Often these are shared only with selected audiences. Unless there is reason for not sharing the project’s progress and documentation beyond identified stakeholders (e.g. for confidentiality reasons, see Section 4.3), would being more transparent help the project to develop, engage new audiences and/or receive feedback?

Making blogging or tweeting part of your everyday practice might involve an initial change in how you work to ensure that you make time for this type of activity. You can read more about open dissemination in the ‘Open dissemination’ and ‘Reflecting in the open’ sections of the OER Hub course Open Research.

Open research and open access

Maybe your role has a research component or you have an interest in research? You might be familiar with the terms open access and open research. The former aims to make data and research outputs such as peer-reviewed research papers available openly so that everyone, regardless of whether they are based at an educational institution or have a subscription, can access them. You can browse a Directory of Open Access journals (DOAJ) to find out what journals exist in your subject areas. It is also worth remembering that you can often upload a pre-proof version of journal articles to sites where you can showcase your research, such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu. Open peer review of journal submissions rather than anonymous closed review is also gaining traction, with an October 2015 study revealing that reviewers were ‘more constructive’ and offered ‘slightly higher quality’ appraisals of work when the review process was public.

Open research is about making public not just the end results of research but the process, methods, instruments and tools that are developed as part of the research process. Social media and blogging is often key to this process (find out more about digital scholarship). You might already use social media such as Twitter or have a blog, but these can be utilized in ways to share and develop ideas before they are published formally. Where appropriate, anonymized datasets are also shared as part of the open research process. You have an ethical obligation to ensure that data is anonymized appropriately, and you will need to ensure that you have done this before uploading a dataset (perhaps to a repository such as Figshare).

5.3 Using social media in your context and open tools

Section 2.5 highlighted the importance of digital literacy. This section explores the role of social media and open tools in open practice and highlights good practice examples.

Blogging, Twitter, open badges and social media

Another example of ‘opening’ up processes is, where appropriate, the development of open online courses or incorporating social media or blogging into a course’s activities. Some universities host courses on WordPress, for example. Katie Sykes at Thompson Rivers University developed Lawyering in the 21st Century on WordPress so that students could develop ‘a roadmap for [their] legal career’ whilst participating in regular ‘partner meetings’ and collaborating on a range of projects. The University of Dundee’s Medical School has also utilised WordPress, whilst the University of Mary Washington has developed A Domain of One’s Own, enabling students and teachers alike to host courses and blogs. To help support teachers in the effective use of WordPress, educators at the University of British Columbia have developed an open course on open pedagogy: Teaching with WordPress.

You could use Twitter or other social media (e.g. Pinterest) as a resource, as suggested by the University of Dundee’s Natalie Lafferty:

Other educators create videos as part of their course, or even use the videos to deliver lecture content with face-to-face time then dedicated to practical activity. Bernd Porr at the University of Glasgow has adopted a ‘flipped’ approach to his Digital Signal Processing (DSP) classes. Read Bernd’s story on the OEPS Hub, including tips for creating open access videos.

While awarding a badge or statement of participation to learners for engaging with course materials and activities is not necessarily an open practice, if you are developing open material with an assessment element attached to it you might want to consider using open badges as a way of acknowledging your learners’ achievements. Borders College in Scotland is using open badges ‘… for best practice in Moodle use’ by educators and learners. You can read more about Borders College, and different badging platforms in JISC’s ‘So what are open badges?’ or review open badging platforms such as Mozilla Open Badges and Credly.

Perhaps, while developing your materials, you might want to get a range of perspectives on the course content and decide to solicit feedback through open peer review of your material (as in the case of this course) before you publish your finalized course. Or perhaps your students could use blogging or other social media for assignments? If you’re not sure where to start, check out the short presentation ‘An introduction to Twitter for teachers’ before moving on to Section 5.6.

Use open tools

The Open Source Movement, which promotes collaborative development of openly available code, software and tools was mentioned briefly at the start of the course. You might look to explore, use and even develop this type of resource as part of your everyday practice. Using open source tools and software ensures that everyone has access to the software packages they need when accessing materials. For example, Moodle, the learning management system used by many universities, is open source. You can find a list of open tools in Section 5.6.

5.4 Measuring impact

Pinpointing the impact of a specific factor (e.g. whether or not your performance has been affected by recent training or if the introduction of a new scheme or resource is making a difference) when there are many variables involved, can be difficult. The difficulty of measuring the impact of OERs can be intensified further, as it can be challenging for creators to track what happens with their resources, how and where it they are reused and what kinds of changes are made to them as they develop. This is why it’s good practice, wherever possible, to share back how you have reused someone’s materials with the creator, for example by leaving a comment where you found the original resource and by writing a review of resources in OER repositories if such a facility exists. (You can rate and review resources on a number of platforms, for example OpenLearn Works or OpenStax CNX). Long-term evidence for the impact of using a resource or learner/student feedback could also be shared or reported on.

There are a number of circumstances where measuring impact is important. You might want to see if changing resources increases retention or test scores in your class. Or you might be training a group of colleagues and wonder whether people make any changes to their own practice as a result of their participation. Assessing what kind of impact any changes to practice might have is an important consideration, and can provide evidence for best practice whilst building up a body of evidence for the impact of a resource in a particular situation. Understanding impact is also important for reflecting on what one might do differently or improve on in the future. Impact data is particularly important in relation to OER as there is an emergent body of evidence and a constant need to explore the multifaceted impact that open material has on learners and teachers alike.

But while it’s obviously important to measure impact, it is not necessarily clear how one can do this effectively; the diffuse nature of OER means that tracking a resource’s use is tricky. Tools that can help you to do this include that is embedded in an OER and enables reuse to be tracked. Two such examples are Track OER and CaPReT at MIT. A feature has been developed for OpenLearn Works that alerts the creator of content when their OER is copied to a new course in OpenLearn Works. Some people look at metrics such as the number of downloads or page views. Others conduct surveys. If you have badged your resource or issued a statement of participation, you could use the number of badges or certificates you award as a measure of engagement. However, do these methods constitute measuring impact? What metrics are most effective for particular resources or practices? And what about other variables or factors that might be making a difference?

Further, there are types of impact on practice that are difficult to measure. The OER Research Hub looked at a range of impacts that OER might have on educator practice and found, for example, that ‘78% of community college respondents felt that using OER encouraged them to collaborate more with colleagues’.

5.5 Over to you

Throughout this course, you’ve explored many facets of open practice whilst also looking in more detail at the practicalities of open licensing within the context of OER. So what’s next? Here are some resources for activities you might want to try and some examples of sharing best practice to start you thinking about next steps you could take to make your own practice more open.

Get started …

• Join a community! Ask questions and share ideas about open practice. Start by looking at the OEPS Hub.
• Look at and contribute to mapping OER practice or contribute to and explore OER impact evidence and policy.
• Can you incorporate OER into your own work? Could you make a resource using openly licensed material and share it with others?
• Commit to sharing a percentage of your own material in the open.

Try something different …

• Share your own experiences by blogging. Read ‘Blogging as reflection’.
• DS106 (Digital Storytelling 106) has a Daily Create where people share their own makes/responses to a fun task that’s posted each day. See also the Daily Create as a P2PU Challenge.
• Create an open course using a platform such as OpenLearn Works or Peer 2 Peer University’s Course in a Box (P2PU).

Remember if you make something, to share or publicize it so that others can use it too.

Spread the word …

• Discuss OER with colleagues or get together to explore the potential of OER at your institution or organization.
• Work with colleagues or students to repurpose or create materials. Good examples of different types of practice can be found via Siyavula and BCcampus (see Section 4.5) and Byron High’s creation of their Statistics Course and the University of Dundee’s Medical School.
• As well as talking with colleagues about using OER, you can also talk with students or clients about the types of resources you are using. What makes them different from resources you previously used, why are you using them and what impact (if any) does it have on your students? For more ideas, check out P2PU’s course Teach Someone Something with Open Content.

5.6 If you want to know more

Each If you want to know more … section of the course thematically presents additional material and resources on the topics for that section of the course.

Understanding open practices and open educational resources

To develop your understanding of OER and OEP further, you could:

• Delve deeper into the concept of ‘openness’ and where ‘open’ changes your approach to different (e.g. open access, open data or open research) Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) offer a great range of courses developed and run by the community on different topics such as copyright and open licensing.
• Work through the Creating open educational resources course on OpenLearn.
• Take a look at Edutopia’s ‘Open educational resources (OER): resource roundup’, which gives an overview of how and where to look for different types of OER, or open material for particular occasions or themes (e.g. national holidays).

Using open educational resources

Here is a selection of resources to explore:

Measuring impact

• This CETIS publication gives great advice on how to measure the impact of OER (see p. 69).
• The OER Research Hub researches the impact of OER on learning and teaching and also curates other evidence for OER impact.
• The Open Education Group’s Review Project brings together peer-reviewed research on OER.

Open pedagogy

• Viv Rolfe reflects on open pedagogy and her participation in the University of British Columbia’s course Teaching with WordPress in ‘The pic-a-mix of open education’.
• Check out ‘The pedagogy of open learning’, a section of the Creating open educational resources course on OpenLearn.
• You may remember Natalie Lafferty from earlier in the course. Read her presentation on ‘Students as producers of open learning’, which gives more background and insight into Dundee University’s medical school students as co-creators of OER.
• Jesse Stommel’s presentation ‘Open door classroom’ explores ‘… the ethical and pedagogical considerations in having students use open resources but also on learning in public, doing public work, and engaging with open learning communities.’ If you’re interested in more hands-on activity and maker spaces, read Laura Fleming’s ‘A librarian’s guide to OER in the maker space’.

Twitter, blogging and social media

• The European Commission funded Open Education Europa is curating and compiling a list of best practice from across Europe.
• Find out more about ‘30 innovative ways to use Google in education’.
• Interested in improving your Twitter skills? Read ‘Tweet like a ninja – updated!’ by Gwyneth Jones, aka The Daring Librarian.
• Interested in external and internal engagement at your organization or institution? Read Dave Webster of the University of Gloucestershire’s ‘Lessons learned: how departmental social media use in universities needs to evolve and grow’.

Open research and digital scholarship

• The OER Research Hub course on Open Research on P2PU covers the meaning of open research, how to be ethical and open and disseminating and reflecting in the open.
• ‘Why open research?’ takes you through the main reasons for ‘going open’ whilst providing lots of great practical advice and resources.
• The P2PU course Open Science: An Introduction course explores what open science is.
• Curious about what specific terms mean? The Right to Research Coalition has created an Open Research Glossary for you to consult.
• Thinking about ethical issues? Read ‘The ethics of digital scholarship’ by Martin Weller, or download his book The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice.
• Still wondering why open access makes a difference? Read ‘Why I don’t care about open access to research – and why you should’ by Michael White.

Open tools

Here are some open tools that you could use or incorporate appropriately into your teaching:

• ‘Open source software’ (Wikipedia definition)
• ‘101 open source tools for developers’
• ‘Examples of open source software’
• GitHub (for code)

Open data

• Want to find out more about open data? Read the Open Data Institute’s ‘What is “open data” and why should we care?’ or check out this Q&A with Marieke Guy (formerly of Open Knowledge Foundation).
• The Open Data Handbook sets out the case for using and releasing data in the open and provides useful information on what you need to consider.
• OpenDataScotland.org has made a range of open datasets available, whilst the Open Knowledge Foundation has listed organisations and public bodies in Scotland that release data openly in its Open Data Catalogues.
• The Open Data Research Network’s ‘Exploring the emerging impacts of open data in developing countries’ is mapping the different uses and impacts of open data around the world.
• Find out more about using Figshare to share your data and research.

Open accreditation and open badging

Find out more about different ways open badges are being utilised by these organisations and initiatives:

• University of British Columbia’s Open Badges UBC
• The Open University’s badged open courses
• Caring counts: a self-reflection and planning course for carers
• Social Partnerships Network courses
• Understanding Parkinson’s for health and social care by Parkinson’s UK and the OEPScotland project
• Development impact & you: learning modules – DIY Learn online learning program in innovation.

Acknowledgements

This chapter is a cloned version, with minor modifications, of a course that was developed as part of the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project funded by the Scottish Funding Council, which supports and builds best practice in open education in the Scottish HE, colleges and third sectors.