OER Update
Open Education News, Resources and Tips - January 2021
OER - More Important than Ever
There's nothing like a world-wide pandemic, wherein educators were forced to abruptly convert to distance-only delivery for many months, to challenge us and our students. Freely-available, open educational resources can play a role during such trying times by increasing student access to educational materials.
Today, even as we hope for a return to 'normality', the cost of traditional textbooks continues to rise, to the point of impeding some students' ability to attend university. More and more educators are beginning to explore the possibilities of OER that can support student access and equity and also allow educators the freedom to update and customize teaching materials.
As your new OER Liaison, I'll be publishing this monthly newsletter in order to send you the best news, tips, and resources to help you navigate the ever-growing world of OER (with some open pedagogy and general promotion of all things Open thrown into the mix, too).
- Rebecca Dowgiert
Featured OER Resources
OER Resource of the Month: The OER Starter Kit
The OER Starter Kit, by Abby Elder, does just what the title says - provides an excellent introduction to how to find, modify, and even create new open education resources. Designed for those new to the subject.
#WOCINTECH Stock Photos
This Flickr account offers Free stock photos of women of color engaging in technical tasks. All images are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-License.
OER Evaluation Criteria
Affordable Learning Georgia provides this basic OER evaluation list (as a downloadable PDF file).
Creative Commons Licenses - What are those?
"Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, “What can I do with this work?”"
- from: https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/
Confused or confuzzled about those 'creative commons' licenses that everyone creating OER is using? Wonder no more - creativecommons.org clearly explains the six different types of creative commons licenses, and also demonstrates how to clearly state how you are licensing your work.
Also of interest may be this brief description of how the creative commons came to be.
Upcoming Worldwide Event -- Open Education Week
Founded in 2013 by the Open Education Global (previously Open Education Consortium), the goal of Open Education Week is to raise awareness and showcase impact of open education on teaching and learning worldwide.
More info. at: https://www.openeducationweek.org
Wondering what types of events have been held worldwide in the past? Search here by year.
Monday, Mar 1, 2021, 09:00 AM
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Finding OER - Metafinders
- Mirela Roncevic
Scattered, indeed. The plethora of general repositories, OER textbook publishers, open publishers of monographs, and subject-specific repositories can quickly overwhelm. At such a moment, the best place to start may be by using a federated search engine that will search across multiple sites at once. Fortunately, there are now several of these 'metafinders' to chose from.
The Maryland Open Source Textbook Commons (MOST) allows you to search more than 30 major OER repositories. The front page interface lets you limit your search by subject and education level. The advanced search page has even more options to focus your search, such as via material type or accessibility requirements. You can also browse several curated collections.
Mason University's Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) describes itself as a "real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the search button." Search for your topic in the entire record, in the title, or choose a date range. to the right, you will see a listing of repositories searched. MOM makes a point of also searching general open repositories such as the Internet Archive where useful items may be found, but warns us to double-check that the licenses of all such items are indeed 'open'.
OASIS, developed by SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library, may be the most comprehensive metafinder yet, searching 117 sources of open content. The front page interface lets you search with your topic/keyword, or browse by OER type (e.g., textbooks, learning objects, etc.).The advanced search interface lets you focus your search by title, author, subject, and by source.
Your Local OER Liaison
Librarian Rebecca Dowgiert has been at the Henry Whittemore Library since Fall 2018. She enjoys finding and curating relevant educational resources and is looking forward to working with faculty to support their OER-related projects.
Email: rdowgiert@framingham.edu
Website: https://libguides.framingham.edu/oer
Phone: (508) 626 - 4654