Commonwealth Educational

Media Centre for Asia

Understanding Open

Educational Resources (OER)

Manas Ranjan Panigrahi, Programme officer, CEMCA, New Delhi

OER Introduction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xGRztrWv-k (2:36 Minuit)

Open Educational Resources

“The Open Courseware

concept is based on the

philosophical view of

knowledge as a

collective social

product and so it is also

desirable to make it a

social property”

– VS Prasad.

What is OER?

Source: http://bit.ly/oerinfokit

Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning

materials that are freely available online for every one

to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-

learner.

Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules,

syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, games,

simulations, and many more resources contained in

digital media collections from around the world.

OER Commons

OER Concept

Digital teaching, learning, research

resources in public domain or released

under intellectual property license permit

free use/re-purposing by educators,

students, self-learners and others

OER includes learning content, software

tools to develop, use and distribute

content, and implementation of resources

such as open licenses

Role of OER in Teaching and Learning OER will be playing an important role in the future in

dissemination of learning resources. The advantages of

use of OER are many viz.

i.) Grab learners’ attention;

ii.) Focus concentration;

iii.) Generate interest;

iv.) Create a sense of anticipation;

v.) Energize or relax for learning exercise;

vi.) Draw imagination;

vii.) Improve attitudes toward content and learning;

viii.) Build a connection with other scholars, educators

and instructors;

ix.) Increase memory of content;

x.) Increase understanding of subject/content;

xi.) Foster creativity;

xii.) Stimulate the flow of ideas;

xiii.) Foster deeper learning;

xiv.) Provide an opportunity for freedom of expression;

xv.) Serve as a vehicle for collaboration;

xvi.) Inspire and motivate;

xvii.) Make learning fun;

xviii.) Set an appropriate mood or tone;

xiv.) Decrease anxiety and tension on scary topics; xx.)

Create memorable visual images.

Role of OER in Teaching and Learning

Three kinds of ‘openness’ cover a range of

academic functions, from production to

organization to distribution, and their

development and use in the academy offer great

potential for shaping practices in teaching,

research and management.

Open Sources: Whether a matter of structure

Open Access: Protocols for informational

organization

Open Content: Pure content

Indicators in OER

What makes a good OER?

Findable

Clearly discribed

From a trusted source

Easily adapted

Free of copyrighted

content

Crowd recommended

OER making process

Get resources

Create

Localise

Remix

Licensing

Use

Redistribute

4R-framework of four

rights:

1.Reuse;

2.Revise;

3.Remix;

4.Redistribute

(Wiley, 2009)

Benefits of OER

Engagement of students worldwide

Enhancing marketing

Engagement with employers

Brokering collaboration and partnerships

Sustaining vulnerable subjects

Enrichment of contents and courses

OER: Guidance and Policy

Make the formal decision to use OER in

the curriculum

Develop a strategy to ascertain where

OER would work

Promote, provide training and support to

staff to use OER in course design and

development

Measure the effects of using OER and

incorporate findings to strengthen the

message

CHALLENGES AND

LIMITATIONS OF OER

Copyright issues

Copyright is the right of the originator to control the

publication and replication of work.

Open licensing is a solution to the copy right worries

of academicians. It offers a way out for controlled

sharing with some rights confined to authors.

There are several open content licenses such as

Creative Commons and the GNU Free Documentation

Licence which introduces a certainty and clarity in

the process of obtaining permission to use the work of

others.

Finally, open licenses establish a body of works

licensed as “open content” that may be freely

shared.

Quality assurance Quality Approaches:

Branding: Before releasing the resources on to

the web, through internal check the institutions

make sure the quality.

Peer review: this technique is one of the most

used quality assurance processes in academia.

There are also arguments for using peer review

schemes to guarantee the quality of resources in

a repository.

Quality management: let individual users decide

on whatever ground they like whether a learning

resource is of high quality, useful, or good in any

other respect.

Sustainability of OER

Some of the aspects need to consider are: Technical considerations such as discoverability of the

resources;

The kind of openness and constraints on access and use that

is given users;

Different content models (the possibility to localise

content) and issues of licensing;

Different staffing models and incentives for people to

contribute resources;

Alternative workflows to the traditional design—use—

evaluation model, to models without a clear distinction

between production and use or between the user and the

producer. The concept of co-production is important here.

Maintenance and updating of resources.

Developing Ecosystem of OER

OER in abundance does not

make learning happen

Concern over quality of OERs

Integration of OER in the

teaching-learning process

Certification of students

learning through OER and

MOOCs

Rethink education in the

context of the network learning

in the era of OER, and help

MOOCs to be game changer

Concluding Remarks OERs will increase access to knowledge resources

Publicly funded organisations have a

responsibility to share and disseminate

information for the benefit of all. It should be

their ethics to the knowledge community.

For individual academicians/users this is their

ethics, to participate in a community of practice

around OER in which sharing of resources and

expertise is expected and valued.

We need to have collective thinking on ways to

further democratise education with OER-Quality.

Thank You