Welcome to the 4th and final workshop in the OER Fellowship! In this workshop, we will consider and plan for future opportunities for your OER. We will discuss ways to use your OER with students and begin to incorporate concepts of open pedagogy. We will also ask you to reflect on and share your experiences in creating OER.
Even after your OER has been published and shared, it is likely that you will find additional things you'd like to improve. We like to think of OER as living resources, which only tend to change and evolve over time in order to better respond to your needs, student needs, and the needs of any others who are using them.
Maintaining an OER doesn’t need to be a complicated matter. As we see it, maintenance includes ongoing changes that are more about function than content, made at any point, during the academic year. This entails keeping tabs on your materials with an eye to grammatical errors, typos, or broken links. You can plan to make these kinds of changes on an ongoing basis as you become aware of them.
Once you start beginning to use your OER in the classroom, you are bound to receive different forms of constructive feedback regarding the content. For instance, you may find that a particular unit has proven to be very difficult for students to understand, or that specific elements like case studies, exercises, or references are not as clear as they should be. These constitute opportunities for improving those parts of the resource, which should be done during this phase in the OER’s life-cycle.
Another category of revisions are those that become relevant due to changes within the OER’s discipline or subject area, or in response to real-world changes that provide new or improved examples of theoretical concepts. These types of revisions highlight how OER can be responsive to wider changes in theory, discourse, and practice. For this part of the process, pay attention to these larger themes, including examples, case studies, language and terminology, methodologies that are cited, resource lists, and literature reviews.
OER do need some amount of ongoing attention to remain valuable resources. A resource that is not improved and updated can be perceived as being ‘too old’ and ‘out-of-date’ very quickly and therefore it can be wise to plan to dedicate some time and attention to ensuring your materials remain current and relevant.
If you make some significant changes such as reorganizations, major revisions, and additions, we suggest that you create and release a new edition of the materials along with a list of corrections and revisions. This can be helpful for your own tracking purposes and also give any other users of the materials clear information about the changes that have been made and let them choose whether they would like to continue using the original materials or begin using the updated edition.
Any corrections, edits, updates, and additions can be listed in your resource’s Version History. Often creators will choose to include this Version History in the back matter of the OER.
A benefit of creating your own materials is that updates can be made on your timetable and with your instructional purposes in mind. And thanks to its open license, know that others may be using, updating, and improving your materials as well!
So far, we’ve addressed updates and improvements to the core OER, but there are other ways in which you may like to expand on your OER. Ancillary materials like slide decks, question banks, instructor manuals, and student workbooks can supplement your resource and make it more useful to you and your students and a more appealing package for adopters.
Other ways to build on your OER is to think of new formats and media through which to share content. You could create an audiobook version of the text, a series of short videos summarizing each unit, or a poster series that creates visualizations of the content. The possibilities are endless – this is just the beginning for your OER and its impact!
With the open license on your book, the different types of spinoffs are endless. For instance, translations, spelling conversions (eg.: American to British spelling), or cultural adjustments can make your OER accessible for use in more regions. Other adaptations, small or large, can make the content work better in different pedagogical contexts, or incorporate regionally specific content that makes it relevant to a different set of users, thus expanding the pool of students who can access, use, and benefit from your materials.
You don't have to do this now or all at once, but we just want to plant the seed and let ideas start to grow!
Free access to learning materials for students is not the only benefit provided by using OER. Another aspect of OER that is commonly commended by instructors is the academic freedom that using openly-licensed content affords them in taking control of their classroom and engaging students in learning. Students are an integral part of OER projects. Students not only can provide feedback to help improve your OER, but they can also be part of the cocreation process to create and help maintain these resources as part of ‘open pedagogy,’ which is described in greater detail later.
But rather than simply think of your students as consumers of the information and resources that you create, your OER may provide an opportunity for your students to contribute to the construction, quality, and sustainability of the materials.
Members of your professional and local community may also be incredibly valuable contributors to your OER. Perhaps they did or could serve as reviewers, or perhaps they could contribute specific content such as case studies, real world examples, or photographs. As you work with your materials, continue thinking about how your OER can best represent and meet the needs, experiences, and personality of your community.
Everyone and anyone who is using the OER or who benefits from this content being openly licensed is part of your community. Adopters, colleagues, students, community members are all part of your community of practice and can help enhance the quality and sustainability of your open materials both now and in the future.
If you are having trouble thinking of ways you might include students or your community in your resource, you might try asking your project manager or librarian for ideas.
For the sake of this workshop, we'll use the definition of open pedagogy provided by Abbey Elder and Stacy Katz in the OER Starter Kit Workbook, which defines open pedagogy as a series of practices which involve engaging students in a course through the development, adaptation, or use or open educational resources.
David Wiley's blog post "What is Open Pedagogy?" also provides a fuller explanation of the concept along with some examples. In this post, Wiley writes:
"Using OER the same way we used commercial textbooks misses the point. It’s like driving an airplane down the road. Yes, the airplane has wheels and is capable of driving down on the road (provided the road is wide enough). But the point of an airplane is to fly at hundreds of miles per hour – not to drive. Driving an airplane around, simply because driving is how we always traveled in the past, squanders the huge potential of the airplane. So what is the analogous additional potential of open educational resources, compared to commercial textbooks and other commercial resources? OER are:
The question becomes, then, what is the relationship between these additional capabilities and what we know about effective teaching and learning? How can we extend, revise, and remix our pedagogy based on these additional capabilities?"
We hope that your use of OER opens the door for flexible and meaningful teaching and learning opportunities. This is really just the beginning.
One method of engaging in open pedagogy is the development of renewable assignments, assignments which students create for the purpose of sharing and releasing as OER. These can range from individual writing assignments in Wikipedia, to group projects developing practice exercises, to co-created textbooks.
Renewable assignments are held in contrast to "disposable assignments," or assignments which are created, graded, and thrown away. Wiley & Hilton compiled the criteria in the table below to distinguish between different kinds of assignments, from least to most open.
Criteria Distinguishing Different Kinds of Assignments
| Student creates an artifact | The artifact has value beyond supporting its creator's learning | The artifact is made public | The artifact is openly licensed | |
| Disposable assignments | X | |||
| Authentic assignments | X | X | ||
| Constructionist assignments | X | X | X | |
| Renewable assignments | X | X | X | X |
Table from Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy by David Wiley and John Hilton, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, CC BY.
Here's a question to consider as you develop and assign work to your students: How might your students’ time and effort now be able to provide future and/or ongoing value?
You can explore a list of open pedagogy assignments or see examples of open pedagogy in action in the Open Pedagogy Notebook.
At the beginning of your project, we asked you to estimate the student savings that would be realized through the development and use of your OER. But measures of impact can go far beyond the dollars saved. For instance, have you seen additional learning and engagement in your course?
Given the care and thought you have given to bringing a student-centered approach to OER creation, are there also ways to carry this forward to look at other measures of assessing student “success” beyond grades? For instance, do you want to know if your students are more motivated, persistent, appreciate collaboration or are more self-directed? We encourage you to to think deeply about non-traditional measures around student success and whether your OER is meeting your goals. How can you dig deeper to understand the impact of your OER? One major area to gain further insight into your OER is by listening to the input of students and/or other teachers who are using your materials.
There are many ways your resource may be positively changing the teaching and learning experience of students. You may choose to keep track of general trends pertaining to course completion/graduation, traditional performance metrics, or course evaluation survey feedback.
As you’re seeing so far, there are a myriad of ways to determine how “successful” or “impactful” your OER is — and this tends to vary in the eyes of the beholder! Measuring impact can involve connecting with adopters, creating technical infrastructure to gather data, or communications work to share this information. This is not something that can lie with just the faculty member teaching with the OER — rather, it is a collective effort.
Any data you collect about adoptions by other instructors is another powerful tool to make the case for OER, as it demonstrates the direct impact on students. This helps make the case for increased investment in the creation of new OER and to the maintenance and further adoption of existing resources. The impact you share could potentially also support a broader call for change in policy/legislation — to make education more affordable, reduce the digital divide, ensure equal opportunity for all students, support fair compensation for educators, etc.
This can take many forms, but what matters here is to continue the storytelling process around your OER. The work that you’ve done matters, so do what you can to make it visible. Through adoption data, student success data, and more, as discussed today, you can proudly demonstrate the benefit of OER for your students and community.
The experiences of instructors who have adapted, developed, created, and used OER are so, so valuable. Your experiences provide ideas or encouragement for other instructors who are considering a similar project. Your experiences inform future opportunities like this OER Fellowship program and help others provide the support and resources that you need to continue such work. If you've made it this far, you certainly have valuable experiences to share and we can't wait to hear them, learn from them, and celebrate them.
As we reach the end of this OER Fellowship program, we invite (and request that) you share a brief testimonial either in written or video form. In your testimonial, please include:
Feel free to include additional feedback or experiences that you would like to share, but use these bullet points as your starting place. You'll submit this to library@westerntc.edu (though you may want to copy your Project Manager as well).
The content for this OER Creation workshop has been adapted from portions of the following sources, which are openly available thanks to Creative Commons licenses.
and video slides are adapted from a template by Slides Carnival, CC BY.
