12 Open Educational Resources: From Khan to MIT
Higher education can now tap into an explosion of educational resources that are free to view, download and modify. That's disruptive to commercial textbooks, media and assessments.
![](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt69509c9116440be8/bltc0182b2356ae8eed/64b83949410a1b4c0bd7459b/IW_generic_image.png?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
What's massive, open and online in higher education?
It's not just the MOOCs, those massive open online courses causing such an uproar by enrolling 100,000 or more in a single class and trying to show how higher education can scale to the masses. MOOCs are a novel education opportunity for students who might never set foot inside a university classroom, but they are descended from another open online phenomenon with the potential to help students both online and off. These are the open educational resources. OERs are textbooks, video lectures, assessments and new forms of gamified multimedia education experiences made available, for free, in something like the mode of open source software.
Usually, OERs are distributed under one of the Creative Commons licenses, allowing students and their instructors broad freedom to download, distribute and remix content as long as proper attribution is given. Terms can vary, however, so institutions need to be careful to avoid overstepping boundaries such as terms barring "commercial use."
While this slideshow focuses on the impact for higher education, OERs are also growing into a practical resource for K-12 due to the efforts of organizations like the CK-12 Foundation.
The OER movement has arguably existed ever since the first instructor posted course materials to the Web along with a note encouraging sharing and reuse of the content. (Perhaps there are also examples that date back to the mimeograph machine or earlier, but for simplicity we'll focus on the Web era). However, just as anyone can blog about an opinion but not everyone has an informed opinion, not every professor who creates OER materials creates quality OER materials.
What's starting to change now is the organization of libraries of OERs, along with systems of peer review and quality ranking, that are giving these materials greater academic credibility. At the same time, both nonprofit and commercial entities are pumping money into creating more polished editorial products and sophisticated software.
Just as open source software has created companies aimed at profiting from ancillary products or services, so too OER has attracted startups like Boundless, which is currently fighting a lawsuit by commercial textbook publishers who accuse it of cloning their work.
The invention of the term Online Educational Resources is generally credited to UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Hewlett foundation, which originated with the family of a Hewlett-Packard co-founder, has also invested in developing OER materials, as has the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
At this writing, a celebration of OERs is under way through Open Education Week, with a School of Open program to follow the week of March 17, 2013.
The MIT OpenCourseWare website launched in 2002, and by 2007 MIT put its entire curriculum online, free of charge. The OpenCourseWare site includes video lectures, presentations and course materials drawn from MIT's standard curriculum. It also paved the way for MIT's entry into the MOOC arena, first with MITx and then edX, a joint venture with Harvard that now has 12 participating universities.
Rice University's Connexions is an OER repository organized into independent modules that students can access independently or an instructor can remix into his or her own curriculum. Established in 1999, the Connexions library now includes more than 21,500 reusable modules, woven into nearly 1,300 collections.
Another Rice University project, OpenStax College, aims to create complete, authoritative university textbooks for subjects starting with physics, sociology and biology. Basic downloads of these texts are free, and print-on-demand versions can be purchased inexpensively.
"Connexions is the largest OER repository in the world, and you can think of OpenStax College as a floor in this library," Connexions editor-in-chief David Harris said in a presentation at SXSWEdu. Part of the point is to establish a greater degree of credibility by thoroughly vetting these texts and making them easy for universities and professors to adopt. OpenStax also provides supporting materials such as presentations that a professor can download and modify for classroom use.
As a spin-off project, OpenStax Tutor aims to provide interactive homework assignments for subjects like physics and math that apply the latest findings in cognitive science to boost retention, plus machine learning techniques to make the assembly of personalized learning experiences more scalable.
While a good OER textbook might undercut the demand for a commercially published textbook on the same subject, that doesn't mean there is no place for commercial resources in the OER world. For example, the download page for the OpenStax College Physics textbook also points students and their professors to commercially produced interactive study materials from Sapling Learning and The Expert TA.
Sapling Learning CEO James Caras said his firm can also play something like the role that Red Hat does for Linux, the open source operating system, by providing a sales force to advocate for quality OER resources and helping educators bundle them into a usable curriculum.
In Fall 2013, a traditional publisher, Wiley, will pilot an introductory biology curriculum bundling an OpenStax textbook with Wiley's interactive learning tools.
Although the first Khan Academy videos targeted math education at the K-12 level, the website's expanding library of videos and interactive experiences are also useful as refreshers and supplementary material at the college level and for advanced placement classes in high school.
AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository) is a portal of educational resources and services aimed at community and technical colleges but free for anyone to use. AMSER is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the National Science Digital Library.
Despite its scientific and technical focus, AMSER also covers topics such as law and religion.
While there tend to be more OER materials for science, technology, engineering and math, the humanities also get their due. The Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning at the University of Texas at Austin focuses on foreign language learning.
Among other things, it provides materials for the study of Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese and Hindi, as well as videos for the study of Spanish and bilingual Spanish-English conversations.
OER Commons describes its mission as "curating best in class learning materials from around the world since 2007." It covers primary, secondary and post-secondary education.
One of the ways OER repositories are organizing themselves to help educators make better choices is by providing mechanisms for rating products, much like in the world of e-commerce.
Blended Learning Toolkit from the University of Central Florida is an example of an open resource for building your own online curriculum. Download one of its sample courses, such as this one on College Algebra, and you get a set of Web templates you can load onto your own server and use as the basis for an online course.
OER University is a project of several higher education institutions with the proclaimed goal of "creating flexible pathways for OER learners to gain academic credit." The website is hosted by WikiEducator, a community for the collaborative planning and development of OER products.
MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, is a repository and community website dedicated to OERs for higher education, with a peer-review process to protect quality and credibility.
Saylor.org is yet another nonprofit site dedicated to organizing the best OERs for higher education.
The Saylor Foundation was established in 1999 by Michael J. Saylor, chairman and CEO of business intelligence company MicroStrategy, and is dedicated to making education free. Professors employed by the foundation locate, vet and organize OER materials. They also create some of their own.
One of the things that makes Boundless interesting (and controversial) is the way it remixes OER materials into "alignments" with popular textbooks from commercial publishers. Rather than simply downloading an OER textbook, students can have it rearranged in such a fashion that they can download and use it in place of the more expensive text their professor actually assigned, knowing that it covers approximately the same material. The modular organization of other OER resources, such as Connexions, helps make this possible.
Boundless is organized as a for-profit company, albeit with a business model yet to be defined.
Sources: This catalog of resources and directories of resources is drawn from several other roundups, including the Free to Learn Guide on the Creative Commons website, Berkeley's guide to Open Educational Resources in Higher Education and the UMass Amherst Libraries OER guide.
One of the things that makes Boundless interesting (and controversial) is the way it remixes OER materials into "alignments" with popular textbooks from commercial publishers. Rather than simply downloading an OER textbook, students can have it rearranged in such a fashion that they can download and use it in place of the more expensive text their professor actually assigned, knowing that it covers approximately the same material. The modular organization of other OER resources, such as Connexions, helps make this possible.
Boundless is organized as a for-profit company, albeit with a business model yet to be defined.
Sources: This catalog of resources and directories of resources is drawn from several other roundups, including the Free to Learn Guide on the Creative Commons website, Berkeley's guide to Open Educational Resources in Higher Education and the UMass Amherst Libraries OER guide.
What's massive, open and online in higher education?
It's not just the MOOCs, those massive open online courses causing such an uproar by enrolling 100,000 or more in a single class and trying to show how higher education can scale to the masses. MOOCs are a novel education opportunity for students who might never set foot inside a university classroom, but they are descended from another open online phenomenon with the potential to help students both online and off. These are the open educational resources. OERs are textbooks, video lectures, assessments and new forms of gamified multimedia education experiences made available, for free, in something like the mode of open source software.
Usually, OERs are distributed under one of the Creative Commons licenses, allowing students and their instructors broad freedom to download, distribute and remix content as long as proper attribution is given. Terms can vary, however, so institutions need to be careful to avoid overstepping boundaries such as terms barring "commercial use."
While this slideshow focuses on the impact for higher education, OERs are also growing into a practical resource for K-12 due to the efforts of organizations like the CK-12 Foundation.
The OER movement has arguably existed ever since the first instructor posted course materials to the Web along with a note encouraging sharing and reuse of the content. (Perhaps there are also examples that date back to the mimeograph machine or earlier, but for simplicity we'll focus on the Web era). However, just as anyone can blog about an opinion but not everyone has an informed opinion, not every professor who creates OER materials creates quality OER materials.
What's starting to change now is the organization of libraries of OERs, along with systems of peer review and quality ranking, that are giving these materials greater academic credibility. At the same time, both nonprofit and commercial entities are pumping money into creating more polished editorial products and sophisticated software.
Just as open source software has created companies aimed at profiting from ancillary products or services, so too OER has attracted startups like Boundless, which is currently fighting a lawsuit by commercial textbook publishers who accuse it of cloning their work.
The invention of the term Online Educational Resources is generally credited to UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Hewlett foundation, which originated with the family of a Hewlett-Packard co-founder, has also invested in developing OER materials, as has the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
At this writing, a celebration of OERs is under way through Open Education Week, with a School of Open program to follow the week of March 17, 2013.
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like