oer affordances and challenges

OER – Open Education

Resources: Affordances and Challenges

Caitlin Carle South Seattle College

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Introduction to OER

"OER (Open Educational Resources) Introduction" by Why Open Education Matters, Blink Tower is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Affordances•Sense of democratizing education •Lowering costs for students•Flexibility for instructors and students•Providing relevant and up-to-date resources•Promotes transfer

Affordance: Democratizing Education• OER allows for a peer-to-peer exchanges for

educators through licensing and sharing information

• OER values and suggests an ethos of the “sharing economy,” an extension of much of the remix culture found in online communities

• OER allows educators to practice what they preach with regard to access, relevance, and student-focused education.

"TEACH YOURSELF" by elycefeliz is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Affordance: Lowering Costs for StudentsCreating a course centered around OER allows students to bypass a financial barrier for education.

“We sometimes have to print things, but it’s better than buying a book we’ll only read half of!” – anonymous student evaluation, Fall 2016

"Money" by Mark Belokopytov is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Affordance: Flexibility for instructors and students• Instructors can tailor assignments to

student need without guilt for bypassing parts of an expensive textbook

• Students can self-guide their learning by choosing from OER readings curated by the instructor or by OER sites.

Screenshot: WritingSpaces.org/essays

Affordance: Providing timely and up-to-date resources• OER leaves room in instruction for

adaptability to external political, social, and cultural conversations.• OER materials are often updated more

frequently and reflect changes in the fields they represent in real-time.

"blmabba266485i8f0-0544" by Anthony Milian is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0

Affordance: Promotes transfer!• As a compositionist, I can see so many

potential avenues for transfer beyond the first-year writing classroom by using OER.• Students can re-access materials long

beyond the course’s completion. • Students can manipulate CC documents

to make them most usable for them both during and after the course.

"Hands Passing Baton at Sporting Event" by tableatny is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Challenges•Attribution management•Uncertainty of licensing information•Accessibility •Search engine availability and functionality•Time and efficiency of OER-seeker

Challenge: Attribution management• Managing copyright, licensing, and the history of where you found

your sources for later attribution.

• Effectively and correctly citing the licensing, level of derivation, andorigins of those sources

Open Attribution Builder is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Managed by WA SBCTC.

Challenge: Uncertainty of licensing information• Loss of information: Between the time I discovered Getty’s Open

Content Program and now (as I create this PowerPoint), the “About” section for licensing was removed.• Because it was all web-based, were I to need to cite their images’

licensing (as I should), I would have a problem!

Screenshots of links to nowhere!

Challenge: Accessibility• Not all OER materials are accessible to devices and programs that

allow various students to interact with them.• For example, PDFs from Open-Source

textbooks can be wonderful for a studentreading on her tablet, but that samematerial may be “read” as only an image by a screen reader for another.

"Accessibility Lab" by Bill Scott is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Challenge: Search engine availability and functionality • OER search engines exist! • Much like managing a research project’s sources, the process depends

heavily on one’s flexibility with keywords.

Screenshot: OpenWA “Find OER” function

Screenshot: Wikimedia Commons search bar

Challenge: Time and Efficiency of OER-seeker • Searching, collecting, and cataloging sources

takes time, especially when it’s new!• One can end up looking as confused

as a cat expected to finish a puzzle…

"Puzzle Cat" by C8LINC is licensed under CC BY 4.0

But it’s worth it!