Open Educational Resources: A Remix Jim Julius SDSU Course Design Institute May 27,

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Objectives  What are Open Educational Resources (OERs)?  Why are OERs considered important by so many?  Where can you find OERs?  NOT: Mechanics of incorporating OERs into your own courses.  NOT: Creating and sharing OERs. 3

4 To remain human and liveable, knowledge societies will have to be societies of shared knowledge. Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO

5 Challenges…  Challenges facing societies –Globalization –Rise of knowledge-intensive societies  Demand for increasingly skilled population  Challenges to education systems –Extend reach of education –Improve quality and flexibility  Could technology offer the solution?

6 New developments…  An important convergence –Increasing connectivity –Growing numbers of low-cost devices –Expanding body of open digital content  Together they facilitate the sharing of knowledge

7 Open Educational Resources: a definition  Web-based materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in teaching, learning and research (UNESCO, 2002)  Only open if they are released under an open licence  Includes any tool, material or technique used to support access to knowledge  Contribute to building a culture of sharing

create share use freely re-use openly vibrant interactive community connected innovative up-to-date efficient effective open education

today’s textbook pipeline authoring editing quality control publishing distribution

open education ecosystem authoring editing quality control publishing distribution feedback peers users learning

Enabler: new IP intellectual property and copyright make content safe to share common legal vocabulary inspiration:open-source software (Linux)

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16 MERLOT  Strategic goal: improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer-reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses  CSU is “sustaining partner”; many other state systems and prominent institutions are partners

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18 MIT OpenCourseWare  1999: faculty response to challenge of online education  2000: OCW initiated  Goal: make accessible all primary course material on the web  2002: launched 50-course pilot  2009: almost 1,900 courses available

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20 Rice University Connexions  Individual response to limitations of traditional textbooks  The vision: “textbooks adapted to many learning styles and translated into myriad languages… textbooks that are continually updated and corrected by a legion of contributors” (Rich Baraniuk)  500+ textbooks, 1 million unique users/mo., 45 million hits/mo., 190 countries

open education opportunities open access free on-line low-cost in print never out-of-print high-quality continuously updated translated democratic

More OERs to consider  Video / audio / lecture – – – – –  Other collections of learning objects/resources – –  Search images, music, and more – 22