Open Education: Content

EDUCAUSE LEARNING INITIATIVE | JUNE 2018

Scenario

Lucia, a citizen of Spain, is a student in Barcelona. She is soon to finish her high school (bachillerato) experience and plans to attend college to study computer science. Her parents are encouraging her to attend university in the United States. Lucia’s father is a proud alum of a US institution of higher education and makes regular donations to his alma mater.

From her bedroom, Lucia goes online to learn more about US colleges and universities. Lucia knows that her father’s alma mater has a particularly large population of students from Europe, so she accesses the institution’s website. She notices right away that the content is translated into a number of languages, including Spanish and French. Lucia uses a web-based chat interface to ask questions of a representative of the admissions office at her father’s alma mater. During the course of that conversation, Lucia shares information about her school grades and hobbies. She also inquires about scholarships and whether she could receive discounted tuition since her father is an alum. Finally, she asks whether the institution offers special services to students with disabilities. Several days later, Lucia receives postal mail from the institution, with numerous brochures telling her about the institution and its programs and services for students.

Ultimately, Lucia decides to stay in Spain and attend college in Barcelona. She remembers her internet-based chat conversation with her father’s US-based alma mater and worries that she shared too much personal information. She contacts the admissions office and asks that the institution delete all of the personal data that she shared during her chat conversation. She asserts that she has the right to be forgotten under European Union law and that the US institution must comply.

1 What is it?

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or that have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others. OER include textbooks, curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, video, audio, simulations, assessments, and any other content used in education. OER provide ubiquitous access to high-quality, effective learning materials that can be easily tailored and freely adapted, revised, expanded, translated, and shared with educators and learners around the world. OER support the practice of open education, an umbrella term for the mix of open content, practices, policies, and communities that, properly leveraged, can provide broad access to effective learning opportunities for everyone.

2 How does it work?

Most OER are available in digital form, which allows them to be stored, copied, and distributed online at minimal cost. OER also includes printed content that is openly licensed. In some cases, students prefer online materials; at other times, printed content is necessary when computers or high-speed internet access is not available. Advocates believe open resources should be provided as editable files with the legal permission to engage in the “5Rs”: retain (make, own, and control copies of the content, including downloading, duplicating, and storing that material); reuse (use the content in a wide range of ways, such as in a class, on a website, or via video); revise (adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself, such as translation to another language); remix (combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new, such as a mashup of content); and redistribute (share copies of the original content along with revisions). Open licenses, such as those provided by Creative Commons, make it simple to allow such free and open use of content while retaining one’s copyright for that work.

3 Who’s doing it?

OpenStax, based at Rice University, has developed 35 textbooks that are used by students in college and in high school Advanced Placement courses. The Open Textbook Network, based at the University of Minnesota, provides the Open Textbook Library, a growing catalogue of over 480 free, peer-reviewed, and openly licensed textbooks and anchors an alliance of higher education institutions committed to open content. The BC Open Education Textbook Collection, via BCcampus, is a curated library of more than 240 open textbooks used by thousands of faculty and students. Lumen Learning has a catalogue of over 45 complete sets of OER course materials. Examples and repositories of open resources can be found at the Open Education Consortium, OER Commons, and MERLOT. The Washington State Community College System operates Open Washington, which helps faculty learn about and find OER. Creative Commons hosts a list of OER repositories and runs CC Search.

4 Why is it significant?

Open educational resources are flexible and adaptable, free to use, easily shared, and can be kept forever. They enable faculty and students to readily adapt educational content to meet local needs. For students, OER confer significant dollar savings while also giving learners ready access to a wide range of high-quality, highly flexible educational materials. Many practitioners argue that open education could be positioned as a core education practice, with learners producing, evaluating, using, revising, and sharing OER. For faculty, open content affords rich opportunities to shape educational materials and tailor them to learners’ needs, share knowledge across higher education, and participate more broadly in their field than might otherwise be possible.

5 What are the downsides?

Although OER are free to use, like all educational resources they require an investment to create, adopt, and maintain. Not all institutions are prepared to provide compensation, service support, and policies to support the development of open resources; institutions could investigate redirecting funds away from other content models to support OER development. One impediment to adoption is that some in the academy still consider open content to be inferior to traditional educational materials, and resistance to the concept of open education persists. Work is needed to raise awareness about the value and quality of OER and research about its impact of OER in the academy. Work is also needed to develop policies—particularly for tenure and promotion—that support the development and distribution of open content.

6 Where is it going?

As evidenced in the steady rise of open resources on ELI’s annual survey of key issues, acceptance of OER in higher education is growing. To the extent that the open education movement becomes more fully developed and endorsed—and if pushback continues to build against expensive textbooks, static educational materials, and business models that provide limited and costly access to educational resources—faculty and students will create, adopt, and share more OER. The breadth of open content will expand across a wider range of disciplines. Institutional policies concerning the use and sharing of open resources and their impact on tenure and promotion decisions will continue to evolve, enabling OER to be more commonly accepted as a fundamental tool for learning and contributing to academe. More funding will be dedicated to the development and maintenance of OER. Governments and governing agencies for higher education will continue to increase their recognition of open content, and research in this area will expand.

7 What are the implications for teaching and learning?

In an era when questions loom large about access and affordability in higher education, OER provide a channel to address some of those concerns. Research shows that students save money and can have better outcomes in learning environments where OER is used. Open content offers faculty a means to customize curriculum to better align with learner needs and interests and to collaborate in new ways with peers worldwide. The nature of open resources directly supports some of the most fundamental principles of education in that they are readily accessible, learner centered, collaborative, flexible, and capable of being adapted to encompass new knowledge. Working in an open education environment might better prepare students for work in today’s increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary workplaces.

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