Thank you for taking the time to complete this professional development! We understand that learning about OER and applying open licensing concepts to adapt or create your own work is an incremental process. Please come back to these modules to review at any time. We will keep the links and Texas-related information updated. To receive a certificate of completion for these modules, please complete and submit the final assessment linked below.

By the end of this course, you should be able to:
-Define Open Educational Resources
-Explain the rationale for OER adoption and use
-Explain the differences between the six currently available Creative Commons licenses
-Identify repositories and other resources for finding relevant OER
-Use tools and criteria to evaluate OER
-Recognize steps and associated criteria for adapting and creating OER with proper attribution and licensing
-Create an open educational resource
-Review the current landscape of OER in Texas Higher Education
-Recognize different Texas legislation on OER

The nonprofit organization Creative Commons provides the following definition of open educational resources (OER):

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities.”

In Texas, Senate Bill 810 (SB 810), which was signed into law in June 2017, further defines OER as follows:

“‘Open educational resource’ means a teaching, learning, or research resource that is in the public domain or has been released under an intellectual property license that permits the free use, adaptation, and redistribution of the resource by any person. The term may include full course curricula, course materials, modules, textbooks, media, assessments, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques, whether digital or otherwise, used to support access to knowledge.”

The key distinguishing factor of this type of educational resource is the copyright status of the material. If course content is under a traditional, all-rights-reserved copyright, then it’s not an OER. If it resides in the public domain or has been licensed for adaptation and distribution, then it is an OER.

Before we discuss the benefits of OER in detail, please take a few minutes to watch this video from Abbey Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communications Librarian at Iowa State University. The video reviews the definition of OER but also provides a broad overview of why OER is an effective solution in addressing student barriers to high-quality learning materials. The video also provides examples of how faculty can use OER to enhance their teaching and improve student learning.

Did you realize these course modules are an OER? Do you want to reuse the content, modify it for your students or colleagues? Guess what … you can, with attribution of course!

You’ll learn more about reusing open content and explicit open license permissions, such as attribution, in Module 7. However, understanding what makes it possible for you to reuse, modify, and reshare this work is the first step. These activities are legal because when it was created the author released it with an open license. When discussing open licensing it also is necessary to review definitions of important terms and legal requirements of laws and principles applied to a creator’s work and how it can be used or reused. In addition to introducing and defining open licenses, this module will review and define copyright, fair use, and public domain.

Modules 1-4 provided you with a solid introduction to various aspects of open educational resources such as the benefits to using OER, the 5R Framework, and open licensing. In this module, you will apply what you now know about OER and start finding the variety of open resources available to you. Through this module, you will be exposed to a variety of search strategies used in locating and finding relevant OER, and you will explore some of the more useful online repositories and sites which host OER. This module will also focus on elements of evaluating OER.

Faculty are required to ensure that the teaching materials we use are accessible to all students. Applying a universal design approach to your curriculum allows you to improve accessibility for all learners.

CCBY CCBYSA CCBYNC CCBYNCSA CCBYNCND: No, that wasn’t a typo! The acronyms above are representative of the six different Creative Commons (CC) licenses. In Module 4 you were introduced to open licenses and how they differ from all rights reserved copyright. In this module, you will learn about the different conditions and permissions of these licenses.

In the previous seven modules, you’ve learned a great deal about open educational resources and how they can be used as effective teaching and learning material in your courses. In this module, you will gain experience in applying what you’ve learned to successfully adopt, adapt, and create an OER.

This module will provide a broad overview of OER across the state. This includes discussion of the results of a recent landscape survey by DigiTex, a snapshot look at recent Texas legislation related to OER, and a variety of examples from colleges and universities who are offering OER Degree pathways and OER courses across their curriculum.