Open education is an idea, a set of content, practices, policy, and community which, properly leveraged, can help everyone in the world access free, effective, open learning materials for the marginal cost of zero. We live in an age of information abundance where everyone, for the first time in human history, can potentially attain all the education they desire. The key to this sea change in learning is Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are education materials that are shared at no cost with legal permissions for the public to freely use, share, and build upon the content.

OER are possible because:

• education resources are (mostly) born digital^[1] and digital resources can be stored, copied, and distributed for near zero cost;
• the internet makes it simple for the public to share digital content; and
• Creative Commons licenses make it simple and legal to keep one’s copyright and legally share education resources with the world.

Because we can share effective education materials with the world for near zero cost^[2], many argue educators and governments supporting public education have a moral and ethical obligation to do so. After all, education is fundamentally about sharing knowledge and ideas. Creative Commons believes OER will replace much of the expensive, proprietary content used in academic courses. Shifting to this model will generate more equitable economic opportunities and social benefits globally without sacrificing quality of education content.

Big Question / Why It Matters

Does it seem reasonable that education in the age of the internet should be more expensive and less flexible than it was in previous generations? Education is more important than ever before. Nothing else can do as much to promote happiness, prosperity, and security for individuals, families, and societies. And while many interesting and useful experiments are occurring outside formal education, the degrees, certificates, and other credentials awarded by formal institutions are still critically important to the quality of life of many people around the world.

Open Educational Resources: The Education Ecosystem Comes to Life by opensourceway CC BY-SA 2.0

Formal education, even in the age of the internet, can be more expensive and less flexible than ever. In many countries, publishers of education materials overcharge for textbooks and other resources. As part of their transition from print to digital, these same companies have largely moved away from a model supporting student ownership of education resources to a “streaming” model where learners have only transient access to resources.

Further, publishers are constantly developing restrictive technologies that limit what students and faculty can do with the resources they have temporary access to, including inventing novel ways to prohibit printing, prevent cutting and pasting, and restrict the sharing of materials between friends.

Learning Outcomes

• Define “open” in the context of open educational resources (OER)
• Differentiate between OER, open textbooks, open courses, and MOOCs

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

What impacts have the rising costs and decreased flexibility of education materials had on you and those you know? What role do you imagine all-rights-reserved copyright and related laws have played in driving up costs and driving down flexibility for learners and teachers?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

OER and Open Textbooks

To begin, watch this video titled Why OER? (03:48).

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation defines “open educational resources” (OER) as:

Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others.

Or you could use this less technical definition to describe OER to someone:

OER are education materials that can be freely downloaded, edited, and shared to better serve all students^[3].

In contrast to traditional education materials, which are constantly becoming more expensive and less flexible, OER provide everyone, everywhere free permission to download, edit, and share them with others. David Wiley provides another popular definition, stating that only education materials licensed in a manner that provide the public with permission to engage in the 5R activities can be considered OER.

The 5Rs include:

1. Retain – permission to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
2. Reuse – permission to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
3. Revise – permission to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
4. Remix – permission to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
5. Redistribute – permission to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of to a friend)

The easiest way to confirm that an education resource is an *open* education resource that provides you with the 5R permissions is to determine that the resource has been licensed under a Creative Commons license that permits the creation of derivative works – CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, or CC BY-NC-SA.

OER comes in all shapes and sizes. A piece of OER can be as small as a single video or simulation and can be as large as an entire degree program. It can be quite difficult, or at least time consuming, for teachers to assemble OER into a collection comprehensive enough to replace an all rights reserved copyright textbook. For this reason, OER are often collected and presented in ways that resemble a traditional textbook in order to make them easier for instructors to understand and adopt. The term “open textbook” simply means a collection of OER that have been organized to look like a traditional textbook in order to ease the adoption process. To see examples of open textbooks in a number of disciplines, visit OpenStax, the Open Textbook Library, or the BC Open Textbook Project. Other times, OER are aggregated and presented as digital courseware. To see examples of open courseware, visit the Open Education Consortium and Lumen Learning.

In addition to demonstrating that students save money when their teachers adopt OER, research shows that students can have better outcomes when their teachers choose OER instead of education materials available under all rights reserved copyright.

The idea of OER is strongly advocated by a broad range of individuals, organizations, and governments, as evidenced by documents like the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2007), the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration (2012), and the recently adopted UNESCO Ljubljana OER Action Plan (2017).

Open Courses and MOOCs

In 2007, David Wiley and Alec Couros began experimenting with “open courses.” The idea of an open course was to make the syllabus, readings, videos, and other resources used to teach a class formally offered at a university available to the public and to invite the public to participate in the course by reading, watching videos, participating in discussions on social media, and completing assignments in collaboration with the course’s official students. The informal participants did not receive credit from the universities, but they also did not have to apply for admission or pay tuition. Running an open course required instructors to use OER so that they could be accessed and used by all course participants, both formal and public.

In 2008, George Siemens and Stephen Downes jointly offered an open course on Connectivism and Connected Knowledge (CCK08). This course attracted many more public participants than either of the 2007 courses led by Wiley and Couros – more than 2000 learners participated. This large number led Dave Cormier to refer to CCK08 as a “massive open online course” or MOOC, a reference to the massively multiplayer online role-playing games that had become popular in the late 1990s. Watch this video describing MOOCs:”What is a MOOC?” video by Dave Cormier, CC-BY 3.0 (4:26).

Years later in 2011, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig of Stanford taught an online course in artificial intelligence that did not use OER but encouraged participation from the public. The media quickly described this course as a MOOC. In this case, the MOOC label had the effect of blurring the definition of “open” in MOOCs to mean open admission (for anyone to join) rather than openly licensed content.

Today, several for-profit and nonprofit MOOC providers exist, including edX, Coursera, and FutureLearn. While they all provide free access / open admission to their courses to the public, none of these organizations are committed to creating or using OER like the authors of the original MOOCs were. The pedagogy of these later MOOCs also differs significantly from the diverse, connected practices of the early MOOCs Cormier described in the video above.

Recent MOOCs have generally become much more uniform and sterile, and generally consist of watching short videos and answering questions. Tony Bates describes MOOCs based on the earlier open and exploratory model as cMOOCs, and the more homogenized and corporate style as xMOOCs.

Final remarks

OER, whether organized as open textbooks or opencourseware, provide teachers, learners, and others with a broad range of permissions that make education more affordable and more flexible. These permissions also enable rapid, low-cost experimentation and innovation, as seen by the early MOOCs.

---