Open Educational Resources, Open Textbooks,
and Open Pedagogy
November 2021
This year several faculty and staff members are participating in the AAC&U Institute on Open Educational Resources. Jane Carlin (Library), Margot Casson (Educational Technology) Heidi Morton (Education), Melvin Rouse (Psychology), and Ben Tucker (Library) are attending workshops, engaging in conversation and working to understand and improve the landscape at Puget Sound in order to create an environment where our students can best benefit from OER, open textbooks, and open pedagogy.
Collins Memorial Library has been supporting and promoting open educational resources for several years now, and our efforts have continued to gain momentum. A subset of the open access (OA), the open educational resources (OER) movement was largely inspired by the need to share and customize affordable resources for teaching and learning. Per SPARC’s definition, OER are “teaching, learning, and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others.”
OER can take many forms: lesson plans, assignments, games, or interactive media, but open textbooks have generated the most interest and publicity. Adopting open textbooks is a proven means of reducing costs to students and improving student performance and retention, especially those with greater economic need.
While OER are extremely powerful instruments of learning, open pedagogy plays an essential role in bridging the gap between content and transformational learning for students. Open pedagogy, also known as open education practices (OEP) invites students to participate in the co-creation of knowledge that is contributed to the commons through open licensing. Instructors can engage students in this creating sustainable assignments including development of texts in a similar fashion to the open source community.
Links
- OER Explained
An overview defining open educational resources as teaching, learning, and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OERs can be full courses, course materials, lesson plans, open textbooks, learning objects, videos, games, tests, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports access to knowledge. - Finding OER Content
While there is no single centralized directory of all OERs, this page links to useful repositories of open textbooks and other OERs. This includes regional and disciplinary repositories. - Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons are extremely important in the realm of Open Education, both for using existing materials and licensing newly created materials. This page is a useful introduction to a variety of Creative Commons licenses a variety of Creations. - Creative Commons for Creators
For those looking to create OERs, and/or integrate OERs, this page will help you decide what Creative Commons license to use. It also provides great information about how to cite Creative Commons resources, including the Open WA Attribution Builder.
Need Information? Don’t forget the Collins Memorial Library – Library Guides
Questions? Contact your liaison librarian
Comments: Contact Jane Carlin, library director
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