Faculty Guide to Open Educational Resources: OER Explained

• Community College Consortium for OER

  Our mission is to expand access to education by promoting awareness and adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER). Over 250 colleges have joined us and many more participate in our activities and use resources on the website.
• ODEPO

  ODEPO (Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations) is a wiki-database of organizations involved in providing educational content online. Currently, ODEPO includes more than a thousand sites affiliated with various organizations, the majority of which were provided to us by educational repositories involved in the creation and expansion of Open Educational Resources (OER).
• The Open Education Consortium

  A global network of educational institutions, individuals and organizations that support an approach to education based on openness, including collaboration, innovation and collective development and use of open educational materials. The Open Education Consortium is a non-profit, social benefit organization registered in the United States and operating worldwide.
• Open Education Resource Foundation

  The Open Education Resource (OER) Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organisation that provides leadership, international networking and support for educators and educational institutions to achieve their objectives through Open Education.
• Open Oregon

  Open Educational Resources Network in Oregon State - learn about OER events and Browse or search the Resources to find out what Oregon community college instructors are using to reduce textbook costs in their courses. If you see a name and email address, feel free to contact that person about their class.
• Open Washigton

  Open Educational Resources Network in Washington State - Learn OER, Find OER, Attribution Builder, and OER Stories.

The Open Education movement is built around the 5 R's of Open. These represent the gold standard in openness:

1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
2. Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in class, in study group, on a public website, in a video)
3. Revise – the right to adapt, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., mashup)
5. Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Adaptive Learning: an educational process that adapts teaching materials and methods to each student's individual needs.  Several software solutions use learning analytics to provide learning path to users.

Attribution - usually means identifying who has originally created a published work, may be a requirement of a license if an item is being re-purposed or reused

Creative Commons License - are applied to published work online and offer simple and clear information about what other people can and can't do with that work

Copyright - a form of intellectual property that gives the owner of an original work

Freemium - the model which a work is available digitally for free and in a print-on-demand format for a cost

MOOC - Massive Open Online Course:  an online course that is freely accessible to anyone and often includes open course materials and opportunities for interactions and collaboration between students

Open assessment - the process of making assessment of students work open and driven by community rather than closed and proprietary

Open content - content that is made available under an open license

Open courseware - courses or course components that are available under an open license

Public domain - works in the public domain are not subject to copyright because their original copyright was never established or has since expired

Repository - a place to put resources for safekeeping and dissemination