“OER Logo” by schlafanzug_ is licensed under CC BY 2.0

OER’s in teaching

For many educators, OER’s are an instrumental part of their practice. Although inventing new teaching resources is necessary sometimes, endlessly reinventing the wheel is exhausting. It is important to find resources online which can be freely used and adapted to fit student needs to lessen the workload. However, not all online resources are free to use, edit or share. In fact, many people use resources without proper permission.

 

This post will cover 4 main topics about OER’s

  1. The difference between Online Educational Content and Openly Licensed Educational Content
  2. How to identify and find OER’s
  3. How to assess an OER
  4. What to do if you can’t find an OER that suits your needs

 

1) OER’s and how they differ from all Online Educational Content

Online educational content can be easily accessed through a variety of technologies. Online educational content includes all digital learning resources found online. However, not all content is openly licensed educational content. Openly licensed educational content specifically refers to educational resources that you can share, use, and in some cases, adapt without asking permission of the original owner or creator (OER Africa, 2020). This is the content teachers should be seeking and using.

 

2) How to identify and find OER’s

Unfortunately, identifying OER’s online is not always easy, unless you know what you’re looking for. This resource created by OER Africa helps users understand what OER’s are and how to search using the Creative Commons search engine, YouTube filters, and more.

Some other great collections of OER’s can be found at:

  • OER Commons provides resources for teachers that can be sorted by topic, grade, and subject.
  • Open School BC offers BC openly licensed learning resources for students grade K-12
  • Teach BC allows teachers and organizations to share resources for public access.

 

3) Assessing OER’s

Once you have found an OER, you need to decide if it is right for your purposes. Below is a set of criteria made by the BCOER (2015) for evaluating OER’s.  When done frequently, evaluating resources using this criterion becomes a simple and efficient process.

“Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Education Resources” by BCEOR is licensed under CC BY 4.0

For example, this video, which is openly licensed, could be used to explore the topic of bears with a Kindergarten class. However, it is important to evaluate this video before using it in a learning setting.

(All Things Animal TV, 2014)

 Here is my analysis of this video using the BCOER criteria:

  • Relevance: This video directly relates to the BC Science Curriculum for Kindergarten (British Columbia Ministry of Education, n.d.).
  • Accuracy: The content in this video is accurate, lacks spelling or grammatical errors and is easy to understand for young children. It is unclear if this video has been peer-reviewed; however, the creators All Things Animals TV have a great deal of child-friendly, accurate, animal videos, thus I feel they are a reliable source.
  • Production Quality: This video is clear, concise, easy to understand, uses multiple modes of communication (pictures, audio, text, labeling, etc.), and is easy to navigate and access via YouTube.
  • Accessibility: This resource only appears to be available in video format; however, you can easily open closed captions and there is a script of the narration included in the description making this video accessible to viewers with diverse needs.
  • Interactivity: The only interactive element of this video is a movement prompt at the end. Thus, interactivity could be improved. This could be achieved by editing the video to include some guiding questions and discussion prompts.
  • Licensing: This video is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution License. Thus, you can copy, distribute, display, and even remix this video (OER, 2020), making it ideal for classroom use!

My review of this resource identified that this video has great potential for use in a classroom, especially if adapted to become more interactive.

 

4) What to do if you can’t find an OER to suit your needs

This is a question that I find is highly relevant to educators, but not often addressed.  Here are some strategies that may help when you can’t find a suitable OER:

  • Find a similar, pre-existing OER and adapt it (The Open University, 2017).
  • Create your own resource and consider attaching a creative commons license and uploading it to an OER platform to share with others.
  • Encourage colleagues to attach creative commons licenses to their work and share online.

 

Concluding Thoughts

By using and sharing work licensed through creative commons licensing, educators can help build a wonderful collection of free, online resources to support one another! If you are an educator, consider using and making OER’s and share how it went in the comments below.

 

References

[All Things Animal TV]. (2014, September 3). * BLACK BEAR * | Animals For Kids | All Things Animal TV [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jyFpgIWzsE

BCOER. (2015). Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Educational Resources [PDF]. Retrieved from https://open.bccampus.ca/files/2014/07/Faculty-Guide-22-Apr-15.pdf

British Columbia Ministry of Education. (n.d.). BC’s New Curriculum: Science K [Web page]. Retrieved from https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/science/k

OER Africa. (2020). What is Open Licensing? [Web page]. Retrieved from https://www.oerafrica.org/book/what-open-licensing

The Open University. (2017). Week 5: Selecting and using OER [Web page]. Retrieved from https://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=87869&printable=1