Open Educational Resources - handout

UTS: LiBRARY
OER – what they are, why use them, where to find them, and how to use them
What are OERs? / Open educational resources (OER) are free openly licensed materials that can be used for teaching, learning and other purposes.
OER come in a wide variety of types and formats. Many are looking for individual media elements to use within their courses, such as photos, graphics, videos, and audio, licensed in a way that freely permits educational use. /
Includes what, why, where, who, and how with links to further reading.
How can I use OER? / OER are available to:
  1. Reusecontent unaltered
  2. Revise - adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content
  3. Remix - combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new
  4. Redistribute - share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others
under Creative Commons (CC) licences. /
Provides a definition and discussion of “open” content including what makes it less “open:
What is Creative Commons?
What is a CC licence? / Creative Commons is a global non-profit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Offering your work under CC doesn’t mean giving up the copyright. It means permitting users to make use of your material in various ways, but only on certain conditions. There are 6 Creative Commons Licenses. /
Includes the rationale of the various licences and a licence chooser tool i.e. how to choose the right licence.
CC Australia provides factsheets for Education
is a 5:32 min animation describing Creative Commons licences
Are all freely available resources OER? / No. Check whether the content is offered under a CC licenceOR whether it has terms and conditions. Don’t forget to check the copyright guidelines.
Note the Copyright Guidelines for Video
Materials / lists streaming video collections which may be used for “flipped learning”, licenced by the UTS Library to be freely available to staff and students e.g. EduTV and TVNews.

How do I search? / An OER database such as OER Commons offers filtering by educational level and material type as well as abstracts and ratings. However Google also offers advanced search for file type and usage rights / is a 2:36 video on How To Search OER Commons

Finding OER in Google
Where will I find online multimedia? / There are many sources of OER, some of which will enable searching by media.
  1. Search by type of media
  2. A database of freely usable media files to which you can contribute
  3. A table provided by Jisc showing which content collections include images/video and which do not.
  4. UTS Library subject guides to online educational resources include both OER and Library subscribed video resources.
  5. A very long list of sources of visual content
/
Has anyone evaluated the various OER repositories? / The Open Education Resource Repository (OERR) rubric was developed by the BCOER Group to provide a process of evaluating open education resource repositories. / OERR Rubric
can be searched by subject, type, authority level, audience, etc.
What does OpenCourseware mean? / OCW are course lessons created at Universities and published for free via the internet. OCW are Offered under Creative Commons licenses. Materials can include syllabi, written lectures, assignments, readings, videotaped lectures, and audio lectures. / Examples of OCW include:




Are MOOC OER? / No. A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course freely available to anyone that registers. MOOCs are not OERs because they are not offered under Creative Commons Licenses but require users to comply with Terms and Conditions.Please note MOOC are not OER. / Well-known examples of MOOC platforms are:



16/03/16 – OERS handout UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F