By Deborah Taylor and Rebecca Barnes
Welcome to this week of blog posts where we’ll be focusing on the theme of Open Educational Resources (OER). You’ll hear from members of the University’s OER Steering Group on the following topics over the next five days:
- Introduction to OER, their benefits and how to find them
- How the University supports you to use OER
- Student involvement in OER
- The work of the University’s OER Steering Group
- Reflection from Dave Forrest, Deputy Vice President for Education (Student Experience), on the opportunities presented by OER
In our first blog post we’ll look at the benefits of Open Educational Resources, or OER, and why it’s a good idea to use them in teaching and learning:
Open Educational Resources are “Teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open licence that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.” (UNESCO).
Why do we love Open Educational Resources?
They’re adaptable. OER differ from other open access resources because they can be modified and re-purposed, allowing you to customise existing resources to suit your teaching and your local context. You can adapt an OER to include examples from Sheffield or the UK or to include a diverse range of voices, whereas commercial publishers are unlikely to permit adaptations to their texts.
They’re available to everyone. Commercial resources that are provided and managed by the Library are only available to our students and staff. On the other hand, OER are accessible to everyone at the University and, because they don’t require a University login, they can be used by the wider community, including pre-enrolment students and graduates.
The number of readers is unlimited. Institutional access to commercial texts is often restricted by the number of simultaneous readers. Have you ever been blocked, temporarily, from reading an ebook with a single-user or three-user licence? For students who need to access a key reading before a seminar or an assignment deadline, this delay could be frustrating but, because OER are open, there is no limit to the number of people who can use a resource at one time, within and outside the University.
They’re zero cost (well, sort of). Unlike commercial resources they don’t need to be purchased from library suppliers but there is a cost involved in creating, adapting and supporting the move to OER. However, increasing our use of OER could help the University to move away from some of the expensive and unsustainable business models that we currently experience. By way of illustration, our two most expensive textbooks last year had an annual subscription of £17K and £11.5K.
They’re included in the ACP. The Academic Career Pathways recognise the use and development of open educational resources as evidence of improving teaching practice. Adapting or creating an OER is an opportunity for you to showcase your work to teachers and students globally and helps to provide people worldwide with access to high-quality education.
Where can I find Open Educational Resources?
OER are not limited by format and you will find textbooks, diagrams, quizzes and lesson plans with a Creative Commons licence or other open licence that allows the resource to be adapted and repurposed.
The Open Textbook Library is a good place to search for textbooks. You can browse by subject area and read reviews written by people who use these books.
OER Commons contains a wide variety of material including diagrams, quizzes, and lesson plans. It has a growing collection of over 50,000 OER along with some curated collections: