1 About Open Educational Resources

Open Education​

Open education encompasses a set of practices directed at making the process and products of education more transparent, understandable and available to all. Open education seeks to make education more accessible, affordable, and inclusive through the use of open educational resources. Throughout this module participants will gain an understanding of open educational resources and the impact they have when producing, sharing and building knowledge.

This is an adaptation from Open UBC  and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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The easiest way to define OER is to think of them as Free resources with Permissions. Free includes cost, meaning it should be freely available and not cost money to access it. But free also means that the OER should be free of access barriers too. For example, you shouldn’t have to purchase expensive software to view or read an OER. Permissions in the OER landscape refers to the 5R permissions: Retain, Revise, Remix, Reuse, and Redistribute. These permissions are clearly articulated to students, faculty, community members, and anyone in the world using open licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses. It is important to know that copyright is automatic in Canada, and by applying a Creative Commons license to your creative or intellectual work, you are clearly articulating to users what they can and cannot do with your work.

Using the example of an open textbook written by an American professor for a U.S. college to further explore the 5R permissions. Because the American professor used a Creative Commons license for their open textbook, students are able to freely retain or keep a copy of the textbook on their computer, their phone, or even print a copy for their own use. Now, let’s say a professor at Univeristy of Toronto finds this open textbook and wants to use it in their class. They are able to not only retain a copy but they can redistribute it to their students by posting a link to it in their course’s Quercus site. Let’s then say they want to also revise the content and want to add more localized examples and case studies. They also would like to add openly licensed images and some quiz questions and video content. This professor can actually remix the original open textbook from the U.S. professor, adding in all of these examples, images, videos, and quiz questions and ultimately create a course learning material that is tailored to the unique learning context of students at the University of Toronto. Finally, the same professor could then redistribute this resource and make it available to others who could in turn create their own revised/remixed versions tailored to their unique cultural geographical, and learning context

This section was adapted from Module 1: OER 101 by Stephanie Quail is licensed under a/an Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0), except where otherwise noted

Open Licensing​