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Different Types of OER

The  broad characterization  of the  two types of OER  can be  ‘ BIG ’ and ‘ LITTLE ’ OER . According to  Hoyle 2009) .  Big OERs are  led or supported by  institution s  that arise from projects such as OpenLearn  or MIT OpenCourseWare . The ir key characteristics are:  high quality, contain explicit teaching aims, presented in a uniform style and form part of a time-limited, focused project with portal and associated research and data.  Little OERs are  produced individually with  low cost resources. They  can be  are produced by anyone, not just educators  or teachers. They may not have  explicit educational aims . Their  production quality  may also be low. They are generally shared  through a range of third party sites and services.  The traffic to many of the big OER sites is impressive . Example:  MIT OpenCourseWare averag es  1 million visitors a month. Most big OER projects have a specific site associated with them . T heir content may  also  be used to populate other portals
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Sustainability models for OER initiatives

Coursera:  Closer to the USU model. 150+ employees. Range of partnerships with universities and technology partners. Started with a seed funding and expanded to public listing. H ybrid of centralisation and decentralisation of both organisation and services . W ork is distributed across some employed staff and a number of volunteers.  P ublish as many of the courses in the  Coursera  course catalogue as possible . D evelopment and production environments run on free and open source software . Offer basic level courses to undergraduate and graduate degree level courses. Range of free to paid courses. OpenLearn:  Closer to the USU model.  OpenLearn  is a  free learning platform , delivered by The Open University as part of its Royal Charter commitment to support the wellbeing of the community. Since its launch in 2006, OpenLearn has become an integrated part of The Open University, with the site attracting over 100 million visitors. Many of these visitors go on to make an enquiry about  
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Choosing a Creative Commons License

Blog post: Choosing a creative commons license: I have considered the different options from among Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works and ShareAlike for the license of choice for my work (blog posts for the OpenLearn course).   Licenses for my blog posts: I would like to choose “Attribution, ShareAlike” option for the blog posts. Attribution option allows other people to freely redistribute my work as long as they give me credit. If I wanted my work to be widely circulated and acknowledged this is the way to go. ShareAlike pushes the users of my work to share my work with their additions with the wider audience. I will choose not to add non-commercial (as long as permitted) as what constitutes commercial is a grey area. An example can be my blog post is used as educational resource and given out to students for free but a course fee may be charged to the students. I will also choose not to add non-derivative because others can make additions or changes and thus add value
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Designing a Course on Digital Skills using OER

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  I made a quick and dirty design for an online course “digital skills” that runs for 5 weeks. The course design looks like this: I explored the different open education resources. Some quick reflections on exploring the 5 open education resources is as follows:   -         Merlot  – has content for pre-K to professional levels. More than 20 material types in 9 disciplines. Has option to create material with content builder. -         MIT OpenCourseWare  – has content for undergraduate and graduate level mostly with few non-credit courses. Materials on 16 main topics. -         OpenLearn Create  – has content from beginner to advanced levels. More than 23 subjects. Has option to create courses. -         OpenStax  – Content organized in 6 main categories of Arts, Business, Humanities, Mathematics & Statistics, Science & technology, Social sciences.  There are tens of thousands of learning objects organized into  pages .  These are  arranged  into thousands of textbook-style  b
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3 Key issues in Open Educational Resources

The three key issues in Open Educational Resources are as follows: 1.       L ack of awareness regarding copyright issues;  2.       A ssur ing  quality in open content; and  3.       S ustain ing  OER initiatives in the longer run.    L ack of awareness regarding copyright issues : Several literature point out the lack of awareness among the academics regarding the copyright issues as a key issue and barrier. Hassall C. et al (2017) identifies the lack of awareness as the top most issue for the use of OERs  as a tool in education, particularly in medical and biomedical education .  OER Research Hub’s ‘ Evidence Report ’  (2013-14) also shares similar findings. Teachers as well as researchers  hav e  access to  a wide ranging of  publishing and production tools . In addition they have  licensing access to a digital,  transitory or fleeting  product rather than a physical object such as a book or print . This interrelation of teachers as well as researchers with  licensing  is at a leve
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