One of the educational technology areas that has yet to have its benefits fully recognised at UTS is Open Educational Resources. Over the last decade, UTS Library has taken the lead in searching for OER and recommending open content in different domains. However, very little examples are found across faculties of using OER in learning and teaching.

Based on anecdotal evidence and talking to learning and teaching teams in all faculties, it appears that academics still need to cross the bridge of OER from merely knowing what they are to realising the benefits of integrating these resources in learning and teaching. 

Open Educational Resources (OER) 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 license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. 

UNESCO, 2014

In the first of a three part blog series on OERS from earlier in the year, David Wiley expanded on this definition and emphasises that OER should allow all the five ‘R’s (retain, revise, remix, reuse and redistribute). Svetlana Knyazeva (Senior National Project Officer in Education, Chief of Section Digital Pedagogy and Learning Materials, UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education) has added a 6th R to the Wiley’s list: recognition. 

Open licenses and open pedagogy

The integration of OER in Learning and Teaching requires people in academia to understand other related terminologies such as ‘open licenses’ that are used to provide clear terms of acts of use and reuse of OER.

The other important term is ‘open pedagogy’, which is defined by Wiley as a set of teaching and learning practices that are only possible in the context of the free access and 5R permissions characteristic of open educational resources. This pedagogy lays the foundational theory for the learning environment to integrate OER in curriculum, and scaffold the learning design approaches for adopting OER in the learning and teaching practices. 

The view from the other side of OER

Many would agree that an efficient way to improve knowledge is to open up and share. Openness in education has brought so many benefits and opportunities to learners, educators and institutions throughout history. It has offered learners the ability to access materials from the best universities in the world without any cost or location barriers.

Many educators utilising OER have recognised personal gain through increased professional skills and building portfolios of academic work. There are the intangible benefits of gaining publicity, facilitating and fostering connections with colleagues around the world and leaving a legacy after leaving academia. Benefits can also be strategic for institutions where sharing knowledge is congruent with the academic mission, as it enhances institutions reputation and attracts new students. 

Despite the benefits, challenges for adopting OERs still exist. Current literature highlight perceived barriers that academics face in creating and sharing OERs. These barriers include lack of institutional policy, lack of incentives and a need for academic support for developing OERs. We continue to observe these barriers at UTS but also have observed great interest from academics in using OERs. The practical approaches that support academics with adopting OERs in their subjects are often the missing link.

Our 5 recommended approaches

In a new resource collection, we put forward five approaches to benefit academics from applying open pedagogy in the learning environment using OER from existing repositories. The approaches are:

  1. Use as is
  2. Revise, reuse and improve
  3. Curate and remix for LMS
  4. Authoring OER
  5. Student-generated OER in assessment

These resources define the five approaches and emphasise the requirements for developing learning activities. You can also explore examples which provide practical evidence of applying the suggested approaches in the educational settings.

Image by Mohammad Hassan

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