OER Facts
  • To date World Campus eBook Program, just over $30,000 has been spent to license e-books with a potential of over $1 million in savings during AY 2018-2019.
  • Affordable Course Transformation (ACT) @ PSU has a potential cost savings to students of $1,468,666 across 52 faculty projects.
  • A pilot program with Engineering took place Spring 2019 and is offered to all majors in the College of Engineering for Fall 2019. The College of Engineering pilot program offered potential cost savings of $272,000 dollars through using World Campus eBook Program.
  • Since its inception of Abington Affordable Course Content Faculty Fellowship Adoption Grant, 15 faculty have participated in the grant, saving approximately 726 students over $70,000 in the first semesters in which the material was adopted. Faculty who continues to use the materials will be contributing to additional student cost-savings not included in that total.

Featured below are 3 modules of information about evaluating, adapting, and adopting OER. Click one of the topics below to expand the section.

Evaluate

There is a misconception that OER are not subject to the same editorial and/or peer reviewed process as traditional publications.

In actuality, many open access journals are peer-reviewed and there is a growing body of OER that are refereed by instructors.

Interestingly, a 2015-2016 research study* found that over 70% of faculty surveyed said that open resources offer the same or better quality as traditional textbooks and many faculty preferred open resources because they can be adapted to their needs and are more likely to be updated.

*Babson Survey Research Group. (2016). Opening the Textbook: Open Education Resources in U.S.
Higher Education, 2015-2016. Retrieved from http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/oer.html

 

 

This 2-page rubric is a synthesis version of the eight (8) separate rubrics for the evaluation of OERs created by ACHIEVE.org.

It is meant as a ready reference for quick evaluation of an OER. (Credit: Created and shared by Rodney Birch of George Fox University.)

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This is adopted from Achieve’s Rubrics for Evaluating Open Education Resource (OER) Objects, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Questions to ask about the OER you are thinking of using.

This is a very comprehensive rubric that you can customize by creating a free account on the RCampus Site.

This rubric is developed by Sarah Morehouse with help from Mark McBride, Kathleen Stone, and Beth Burns is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

  • A Comprehensive Guide to Choosing and Using Interactive Learning Materials

John Shank’s book, Interactive Open Educational Resources: A Guide to Finding, Choosing, and Using What’s Out There to Transform College Teaching provides a comprehensive guide for anyone who is looking for a complete book on the topic.

In Chapter 8 The Selection Process: How to Choose and Evaluate ILMs is particularly helpful in thinking through the process of evaluating resources.

This book is available online through the PSU Libraries. Simply do a search in the CAT with John Shank as author you and you will be able to click on the eBook: Full Text Link.

 

Shank, J. D. (2014). Interactive open educational resources: A guide to finding, choosing, and using what’s out there to transform college teaching.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Adopt

For our purposes adopting OER refers to using open content in it’s original state and using it in a course to replace materials that students were required to purchase. Most often when someone says they are adopting OER it means that they will be replacing a high cost textbook with a free or low cost textbook.

The resources on this tab are provided to help faculty and instructional designers work through the process of adopting an open or low cost textbook.

Step 1: Defining your need.

What are the course goals and lesson objectives that the textbook will help students master?  As you review OER, you can align the resources with your objectives and  lessons to assess suitability and later to identify gaps.

Step 2: Searching for a Textbook- Knowing where to Look

There are a number of high quality open textbooks available in many subject areas and the numbers are growing rapidly. You can view a brief summary of each resource on the Textbooks page. Don’t forget to check out the additional 32 open textbooks listed at the bottom of the page.

Step 3: Keeping Track of your Findings.

We have put together a spreadsheet that will help keep your search results organized. The spreadsheet also provides a space to record your findings on how well the content aligns with your course goals and lesson objectives.

Some additional criteria that you might want to consider as you are making your selection includes:

  • Quality of content, literary merit and format
  • Accuracy
  • Timeliness
  • Favorable reviews
  • Permanence/lasting value
  • Authority of author
  • Scope and depth
  • Physical quality
  • Formats available: print, CD-ROM, online, etc.
  • Reading level and writing style
  • Accessibility
  • Language(s)
  • Copyright restrictions on modification and reuse
  • Cultural relevance

Cultural factors include race, ethnicity, language, nationality, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, income level, and occupation. Ensure that information is relevant to the intended students’ social and cultural contexts. Also, check for ratings, reviews or endorsements of open textbooks and OER by professional societies and organizations.

For more information please refer to the Evaluation tab, which is featured first in this module.

Adapt

In this module you will find two videos to help you begin thinking about the why’s and how’s of adapting OER’s. The majority of the information is around the adaption of open textbooks however the concepts can apply to any open educational resource. After the videos you will find a link to an entire guide created by BC Campus on Open Textbook Adaption.

Adapting OER for use in a chapter of an Open Textbook

Creating OER and Combining Licenses Part 1

This is the first of two parts of “Creating OER and Combining Licenses.” It presents a step-by-step processes of finding and selecting open educational resources (OER) to use in a derivative work, choosing a Creative Commons license, and applying the license to the work. Feel free to reuse, revise, remix, or redistribute this video, which is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b… ), copyright Florida Virtual Campus. Please contact info@theorangegrove.org to freely obtain the actual media files for editing/modification purposes.

Creating OER and Combining Licenses Part 2

The following video explores the challenges of using and remixing open educational resources (OER) with different Creative Commons licenses in a derivative work. It examines the restrictions of each license element, and illustrates how solutions can be found when licenses are incompatible. Feel free to reuse, revise, remix, or redistribute this video, which is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b… ), copyright Florida Virtual Campus. Please contact info@theorangegrove.org to freely obtain the actual media files for editing/modification purposes.

BC Open Textbook Adaption Guide

“This Adaptation Guide provides much needed information on the why, what, and how of making changes to an openly licensed textbook and other open educational resources (OER). In other words, it addresses the “revise” and “remix” members of David Wiley’s “5 R’s of openness”.” – Lauri Aesoph