Open Education Resources

Overview

Campuses across the state have embarked on efforts to lower the cost of materials through the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are education materials that can be freely downloaded, edited, and shared to better serve all students. Research demonstrates that students enrolled in courses where OER are used in lieu of traditional course materials save money and perform just as well, if not better, than control groups enrolled in courses with traditional materials.

Learn below why OER is important, how you can get started with OER today, and how you can help promote and support OER on campus and across the state.

 

The Council of Chief State School Officers, CC BY 4.0. Music by The Zeppelin by Blue Dot Sessions, CC BY NC 4.0 .

How can you get started with OER today?

  • Watch the Introduction to OER webinar presented by the TN Textbook Affordability Task Force 
                        Link to Webinar Recording
                        Presentation Slides
                        Q & A Document
                        References
                        Webinar Transcript
  • Gather the learning outcomes for your course. Keeping your course outcomes in the forefront will help make it easy to select and align content for your course.
  • Discover OER for your course. High-quality OER are already available for most General Education courses through organizations like OpenStax  , Lumen Learning  ,and the Open Textbook Library  .  You can also browse open textbooks, individual lessons, and media through resources gathered in the Creative Commons Directory.
  • Connect with the Tennessee OER Community. Join colleagues in conversation on the THEC Textbook Affordability Listserv.

How can your institution help promote and support OER?

  1. Raise faculty and student awareness of the benefits of OER.
             - Host an annual "Open Education Day" at your school or university or encourage
           participation in global Open Education Week events.  Consider hosting a viewing of the
           Introduction to OER webinar to convene interested faculty and open campus discussions. 
           See "Watch the Introduction to OER webinar" above.
        - Provide OER information to learners.  Require OER Course designations in course catalogs
           so that learners know prior to registration which course use OER (see examples from CUNY
           and San Jancinto CC 
        -Identify key performance indicators to showcaser improvements when courses/degrees adopt
         OER (common indicators include improvements in student outcomes, drop and/or withdrwal rates
         credits taken per semester, student debt, and time to degree).
  2. Empower your institution to drive an Open Education strategy.
            - Update existing strategy documents to include open education goals and adopt an institutional
          OER policy (see the OER  Policy Development Tool, the global OER Policy Registry, and North
          American OER policies and projects     for examples).
        - Launch an Open Education Task Force comprising learners, faculty, accessibility experts, deans,
          bookstore, financial aid, library, instructional designers, elearning, etc.
        -Facilitate an OER Grant Program that will focus on shifting the highest enrolled courses from closed              content  to OER (see examples at the Univesity of Tennessee Knoxville and Tennessee Board of Regents).
  3. Empower faculty to create, share, and support Open Education.
           - Reward Sharing. Adjust  promotion and tenure policies to reward the creation, adoption and
        maintenance of OER as curricular innovation and service to the academic profession.
      - Make it easy to share OER. Join a global repository and/or make the process of sharing clear and simple for        your educators. Require institutionally-funded resources to be openly licensed.
      - Ensure educators have the legal rights to share and CC license their work in contracts between the institution     and faculty (see policy example from Creative Commons New Zealand).

Key OER Platforms

Research

Training Recordings