OER guide

Guidelines to use Open Educational Resources (OER).

What are Open Educational Resources?

You can’t just take anything you find on the internet and use it in the classroom. Documents, images, and materials are generally protected by copyright, so making copies or using them in presentations is often prohibited. Our work with online platforms and cloud-based services makes us increasingly sensitive to this issue. But some copyright questions are not so easy to answer. “Open Educational Resources” (OER) offer a solution. The authors of OER grant users the explicit right to use their work, issuing the work under a license that makes it clear exactly what is and is not allowed. This means that teachers and students who use OER can be certain they are on legally safe ground.

Making education accessible, enabling collaboration

UNESCO defined open educational resources (OER) in 2012 as “... teaching, learning, and research materials in the form of any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”

On the one hand OER therefore improve access to knowledge and education. On the other hand they also offer a special pedagogic potential: Teachers and students can collaborate in adapting the educational media. Not only is this effective, it also fosters creative processes and allows innovative ideas to blossom. In the context of increasingly heterogeneous school classes, it is also an advantage that teachers can adapt existing materials to individual learning and support needs.

The license model of Creative Commons

The non-profit organization Creative Commons (CC) provides seven licensing models that define how materials can be shared, modified, distributed, and remixed. The permissible use of specific content is identified in these CC licenses, which became a global standard for OER's. They give authors the ability to assign incremental rights of use, and they give users transparency about these rights. This way teachers can become users and authors in their own right in this same legally unambiguous environment.

The mandate in education is for “as much openness as possible” so that materials can be freely used, modified, and shared. The following three license types serve this aspiration:

• Public Domain CC 0

• Attribution CC BY

• Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA

The other four license types include additional restrictions that, strictly speaking, are no longer “open” and are therefore less appropriate for licensing OER.

Download the UNESCO "Guidelines on the development of Open Educational Resources policies": https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiV3-Xj9JX2AhX_SfEDHfOtChAQFnoECBsQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.unesco.de%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2F2020-01%2FGuidelines_on_the_Development_of_OER_Policies_2019.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1ajHidHL4-L3G4OaWUZOAY

The 5 R's of OER defined by David Wiley

Wiley, D. (2009). Defining “Open.” In Iterating toward openness.

“Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)

Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

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)”.

The resources on dTeach are published under the “CC BY-SA 4.0 international” license. Please find more information here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode