An introduction toOpen Educational Resources

Workshop at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams

& Michael Paskevicius

from the University of Cape Town

15 April 2010

On 12 Feb 2010 UCT launched

OERs in action

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open educational resources (OER) or Open Content are educational materials (usually digital) that are :

• shared freely and openly for• use by anyone to • repurpose/ improve

under some type of license in order to

• redistribute

• Instructional websites

• Handbooks & guides

• Image Collections

• Open textbooks

• Presentations

• Vula sites

• Podcasts

Example of an OER graphic

Original diagram in a PhD thesis

Adapted for the Portuguese context Translated

into Greek

Adapted and translated to Spanish

Aggregating content: OER Commonswww.oercommons.org

Aggregating video: Academic Earth

Aggregating podcasts: Steeple

Why and why now?

Why now for institutions?• Increase institutional visibility, advancing competitiveness,

attracting students and resources• Promote effective social responsiveness• Improve learning experience by selecting materials in

pedagogically sound and innovative ways• Improve recruitment by helping the right students find the

right programmes• Enhance teaching coherence across courses• Ensure better long-term archiving, curation and reuse of

teaching materials• Attract alumni as life-long learners

Why now for individuals?

• Profile teaching as well as research• Create record of teaching for teaching portfolio• Foster connections between other colleagues,

departments and even other universities (especially cross-disciplinary studies)

• Increase impact of teaching materials• Extend use of teaching materials to high school

learners and life-long learners

Increasing Visibility

Profiling of teaching

Metadata: Describing your electronic resource

Metadata: Feeds to OER Commons

Tracking usage at UCT

What OER has done for UCT

• Still early days but there are signs that our OpenContent site is:– Become part of the OER world– Increasing visibility or materials– Increasing access to materials for other groups –

schools and the community – Improving curation of digital teaching materials– Attracting students (alerted through our feedback

form)– Starting conversations about collaboration

 Practicalities of Contributing to Open Educational Resources

Developing Open Educational Practice

Michael Paskevicius

Difference between "online content" and "open content" (OER)• Much of the content we interact on a daily basis

is online, but that does not necessarily make it open.

• Truly OpenContent can be: – Reused – Revised – Remixed – Redistributed

(Wiley, 2009)

Identifying something to share

• The UCT OpenContent directory hosts openly licensed teaching and learning resources created by academics and students at UCT

o Instructional websiteso Handbooks & guideso Image Collectionso Open textbooks o Presentations o Vula sites o Podcasts 

What resources do you have that you could share?

A Creative Commons image by (ta)

Evaluating the media resources within your resource• If resource falls under copyright protection, either:

o Recreate the resources using office or online tools

o Replace the resource with a similar resource by finding an open source alternative or by creating your own resource

o Obtain permission from the author, publisher, editor, organization who holds the copyright 

o Reconsider if the resource is really necessary?

        

Example: Copyrighted Resource

Recreated resource

CopyrightedResource

Recreated resource

Recreation of images

http://google.com/docshttp://www.gliffy.com/

Sourcing Alternatives • Finding an alternative image

o Search Creative Commons Flickr imageso Images on Wikipedia are either Creative Co

mmons or PDo Medical Images - Grays Anatomy 

o Re-creation of the image for your own purposes o GoogleDocs drawing /diagram tool o http://www.gliffy.com/o Powerpoint, Word, Excel, scanned hand-

drawn graphics

Compfight search for "computer laptop"

Wikimedia search for "leg"

Referencing open content

http://www.learnerstogether.net/how-to-use-and-cite-creative-commons-resources/312

• Mention License • Creators Name • Link to source if possible

Presentation Example

Original PowerPoint presentation

Converted PowerPoint presentation

Discuss issues with resources

• What issues do you foresee with your potential OER resources?

Choosing a license

• Would you allow commercial uses of your work?

• Yes

• No

• Would you allow modifications or derivatives of your work?

• Yes

• No

Questions to ask

OpenContent Suggests

Get a license

• http://opencontent.uct.ac.za/Get-a-Creative-Commons-license

• Copy and paste license into resource

• Or http://creativecommons.org/choose/

Hosting

• Hopefully the resource is already online (LMS, Departmental server, etc.)

• Choose host most suitable to file type o Slideshare (Example)o HTML sites hosted on LMS (Example) o Document Departmental Server (Example)o Flickr o Youtube

• No matter where it is hosted, you will be able to describe it and make it more discoverable using the listing it in an OER Directory!

Creating a link on OER Commons

• Create an account / Log in to OER Commons• Click ‘Contribute Content’• Select type of resource • Enter the necessary metadata • Submit!  • Your resource is moderated and becomes

part of the global community of OER Demo  

References

Wiley, D. (2009) Defining “Open”. Blog post on iterating toward openness. Posted November 16, 2009. Retrieved online April 13, 2010. http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1123

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 South Africa License. To view a

copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/za/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300,

San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Prepared by Cheryl Hodgkinson-WilliamsCheryl.Hodgkinson-Williams@uct.ac.za

& Michael Paskevicius mike.vicious@gmail.com

OpenContent Directory: http://opencontent.uct.ac.zaCompanion site on Vula: https://vula.uct.ac.za/portal/site/openuct

OER UCT project blog: http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/oer-uct

Follow us: http://twitter.com/openuct

Presentations: http://www.slideshare.net/mpaskevi