Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Textbooks

Overview

Open Educational Resources (OER) are materials created and shared under an open license. This enables educators to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute materials, under certain parameters, freely (Wiley). As such, OER offer major potential for lowering the cost of attending college. OER includes textbooks, lessons, videos, readings, activities, test banks, and any supplemental material. To facilitate the process of sharing educational materials, open licenses are often attached to the resources. Of the licensing systems, Creative Commons is most commonly used.

Creative Commons enables creators of content to give advance permission on how they would like their materials used by others. As such, the licensing options provide educators with information about how a given piece of material can be used and opens the door to remix and reuse for particular contexts. Creative Commons licenses are permanent, meaning that the copyright holder cannot revoke the permissions they have given. With the right to retain OER, educators are able to ensure consistent, quality materials for their courses over time.

The following video summarizes what OER is:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cz-CUXjSWlI

• Many OER research studies have focused on perceptions of OER use. While valuable, most studies have examined only the perceptions of faculty using anything they considered to be OER (de los Arcos, et al., 2016).

• Pitt (2015) conducted a study involving educators who used OpenStax College open textbooks. The results of this research indicated that using OER can help educators better respond to students needs and make teaching easier.

• Faculty members tend to believe that without the use of open textbooks, each student would generally spend $100 or more per course on required textbooks (Jung et al., 2017).

• Faculty indicated that they spent about the same or less time preparing to teach a course using open textbooks, while 18% said that they spent more time (Bliss et al., 2013).

• Many faculty (52%) reported little to no change in their instruction as a result of using open textbooks (Jung et al., 2017).

• Faculty members perceived their students as equally prepared for their course using open textbooks compared to using traditional textbooks (Hilton et al., 2013).

• A significant portion of faculty members (23%) believed their students performed better when using open textbooks, while a majority (64%) thought that their students showed the same level of performance (Jung et al., 2017; Hilton et al., 2013).

• Faculty reported that open textbooks have about the same quality as traditional textbooks, whereas 19% thought they have better quality (Kimmons, 2015; Hilton et al., 2013).

Suggestion for Implementations

Researchers propose effective strategies for utilizing OER.

• It is important to regard OER movement as an organizational-level innovation process in which every stakeholder should participate in the process (Jung, Bauer, & Heaps, 2017).

• To achieve optimal results of OER implementation, it is imperative to start by planning for an effective implementation of an OER initiative—the innovation process needs to be iterative and follow a systematic process, such as, (1) analysis, (2) adoption, (3) optimization, (4) evaluation, and (5) stabilization (Jung, Bauer, & Heaps, 2017).

• OpenStax of Rice University suggests several strategies for the successful implementation of OER. These are (1) show support, (2) train, (3) incentivize, (4) try it, and (5) testimonials (OpenStax, 2016).

• OpenStax also suggests measuring outcomes as an indicator of success, not the actions.

Resources and Repositories

OPEN TEXTBOOK

• BC Open Textbook Collection: Founded in 2012 with support of British Columbia Minister of Advanced Education, BCcampus currently has over 150 open access, college level textbooks.

• Open Education Consortium: Includes open textbooks in 24 subjects as well as open courses.

• OpenStax: Supported by Rice University, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and several other foundations, OpenStax offers over 20 high quality textbooks.

• Open SUNY Textbooks: Open textbooks from the State University of New York System.

• Open Textbook Library: Hosted by the University of Minnesota, the Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.

OER

• Boise State University Open Educational Resources (OER)

• OpenEd Research Group: The Open Education Group is an interdisciplinary group of people based at Brigham Young University who are passionate about improving education and a stellar group of partners that are helping us get it done.

• BC Campus Open Textbooks: BC Campus Open Textbooks offers over 150 textbooks across disciplines that are all openly licensed with Creative Commons licenses. They also offer a guide to authoring and adapting open textbooks.

• College Open Textbooks Collaborative: The College Open Textbooks Collaborative, a collection of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoption of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services

• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER): includes more than 500 open textbooks in a variety of subjects.

• Flat World Knowledge: This is a college textbook publisher whose books are published under an open license. This allows professors to customize the books they order – edit, add to, mix-up, or use as-is. Students can access the books online for free or can pay for print-on-demand and audiobook versions.

• Galileo: The repository is administered by Affordable Learning Georgia, an initiative of GALILEO and the University System of Georgia which aims to reduce the cost of textbooks to students and contribute to their retention, progression, and graduation.

• InTech Open Access Textbooks: InTechOpen is the world's largest Science, Technology, and Medicine Open Access book publisher. With a goal to provide free online access to research since 2004, InTechOpen has published 2,773 books and 45,530 scientific works by 96,019 international scientists.

• National Academies Press: Most books published by the National Academies Press can be downloaded for free in PDF format. Just find the book you want, bypass the print price, and click the “Download Free PDF” button. This site requires that you provide a name and email address.

• OER Commons: Materials range from pre-k to secondary. Along with other materials, textbooks are included.

• Open Culture: has a collection of 150 free textbooks from Art History to Physics and Business

• Open Learning Initiative - Carnegie Mellon University: You can access most OLI course materials at no cost to you and work at your own pace*. "Our learning platform gives you targeted feedback as you go, which helps you know if you are mastering a topic or if you need more practice."

• OpenStax: OpenStax offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers

• Open Textbook Library- University of Minnesota and partners: These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.

• Project Gutenberg: is the place where you can download 33,000 free books! This is a great resource for Literature classes and books for young children.

• SpringerOpen: "The growing demand for open access publishing has led Springer to expand our open access program to fully open access books as a further addition to our already established SpringerOpen journal portfolio. Authors in all disciplines now have the opportunity to publish open access books, including complete monographs, edited volumes, proceedings and SpringerBriefs."

• Milne Open Textbooks for SUNY "Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure." -- From the SUNY Open Textbooks website.

• Teaching Commons: The Teaching Commons showcases high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities and makes them available to educators and students around the world. Curated by librarians and their institutions and hosted by bepress, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, lectures, k-12 materials, and more

• Wikibooks: is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational books that anyone can edit. Rather than being subject to expensive static books, Wikibooks readily encourages copying, modifying, reusing, and free distribution of its books.

• Writing Commons: CC-BY-NC-ND.

• Free Online Databases: An online guide featuring hundreds of free online databases. While not everything in this guide qualifies as an OER, much of it will.

• MERLOT: MERLOT is a curated collection of over 65,000 free and open online teaching resources from the California State University System.

• OER Commons: A massive collection of OER divided by subject and grade levels. Includes over 40,500 college level resources.

• OER Knowledge Cloud: Not so much a collection as a massive OER search engine. All journal articles, reports, books, and other items are fully searchable and either pulled from the source or linked to it.

• Open Access Button: This search requires you to already have a citation, title, DOI, or URL before searching and scours the Internet looking for legal, open access versions of your requested article.

• Open Education Consortium: Includes open textbooks in 24 subjects as well as open courses.

• Florida's Open Educational Resources Florida's open educational resource repository containing open collections, including courses and textbooks, as well as links to institutional repositories within the state.

References

• Pitt, R. (2015). Mainstreaming open textbooks: Educator perspectives on the impact of OpenStax college open textbooks. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16(4).

• Jung, E., Bauer, C., & Heaps, A. (2017). Higher education faculty perceptions of open textbook adoption. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(4).

• de los Arcos, B., Farrow, R., Pitt, R., Weller, M., & McAndrew, P. (2016). Personalising learning through adaptation: Evidence from a global survey of K-12 teachers’ perceptions of their use of open educational resources. Journal of Online Learning Research, 2(1), 23-40

• Bliss, T. J., Hilton III, J., Wiley, D., & Thanos, K. (2013). The cost and quality of online open textbooks: Perceptions of community college faculty and students. First Monday, 18(1).

• Hilton III, J., Bliss, T. J., Robinson, T. J., & Wiley, D. A. (2013). An OER COUP: College teacher and student perceptions of open educational resources.

• Kimmons, R. (2015). OER quality and adaptation in K-12: Comparing teacher evaluations of copyright-restricted, open, and open/adapted textbooks. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16(5).