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As a teacher working in an elementary or a secondary school, it is very likely that you need to face a crucial reality - having limited time to deal with all kinds of school duties, including developing lesson plans, creating teaching materials, and documenting student learning progress, etc. This reality in K-12 educational settings could be particularly overwhelming if you are a beginning teacher. Luckily, with the advent of technology and the emergence of K-12 Open Educational Resources (OER), more free and quality resources become available for K-12 teachers. OER allow teachers to save the time creating teaching materials from scratch, yet still have access to materials that support student learning engagement. OER have created an extraordinary opportunity for educators to customize teaching and learning as well as sharing knowledge in various forms across communities, states, and even countries.
OER can be a wide variety of materials used for educational purposes such as videos, lesson plans, digital books, online courses, and teacher websites. Although there are slight differences among how people define and evaluate quality OER, the general understanding describes OER as openly licensed materials that provide users free access and permission for 5R activities:
Here are definitions and examples of the 5R activities teachers can engage in OER for their teaching and learning:
This material is based on original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at https://edtechbooks.org/-tFQ
As described in the video above, there are many characteristics of OER that can be beneficial to K-12 teachers in supporting their teaching and professional growth, as well as student learning.
One of the important characteristics of OER is that OER must be free - both to give and to take. Imagine when teachers are motivated to put effort in their teaching preparation for instructional materials, many of them might need to start from scratch or pay out of their own pocket to purchase some existing resources created by other educators. However, teachers should not be dealing with this situation in a school environment that already has very limited time and resources for teaching preparation. With OER, any teacher can search for thousands of high-quality online instructional resources in a wide spectrum of content areas and get access anytime for free. When teachers commit part of their time creating and sharing open and free teaching resources with the education community, in return, the collective effort will allow them to save time and money on quality teaching resources for their own classrooms. For instance, instead of paying ten dollars to download a low-quality worksheet from ABC.com for a Math classroom activity worksheet, Mr. Johnson would be able to search on different OER websites and download three different worksheets with high reviews from other teachers for free.
Utilizing OER can not only save teachers’ money, but also save their time to prepare for their teaching more efficiently. For instance, Ms. Williams, a beginning 5th grade teacher, can search for existing lesson plans other 5th grade teachers created that align with the same Math standards she wants to teach. Instead of creating a lesson plan starting with a blank document, Ms. Williams already has an idea what activities can be integrated in a lesson plan to address specific instructional goals by searching OER created by other teachers. From there, Ms. Williams can easily gather different ideas and activities she found from standard-aligned OER and create instructional materials for her own class.
In addition to saving teachers’ time and money, OER can be useful and beneficial for teachers because they are customizable. Teachers are encouraged to take an advantage of this feature of OER allowing users to engage in 5R activities. With the permission to remix and revise, teachers have the flexibility and choices to change whichever parts of OER that do not apply to their classes can customize the content based on their own teaching needs and students’ learning needs. For example, Mrs. Harrison downloaded a series of digital reading materials for readers in different levels from an OER website, including news and stories that she would like to let her 2nd grade students practice reading. Yet, it would be impossible for her to directly adopt all the materials in his class due to learners’ various language proficiencies. This issue could be quickly resolved with OER resources as users are generally granted the rights to revise the content according to their own teaching needs. Thus, Mrs. Harrison can easily modify the difficulty level of a reading to offer a differentiated reading activity to her students. In addition, Mrs. Harrison could also remix the resources to fit her teaching needs. For example, she could create three folders (Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced) in her Google Drive and categorize all the reading materials she found in those folders. Then, by continuously adding more reading materials in those three folders over time, she would be able to collect and customize OER resources to address a wide variety of learning preferences and needs of different groups of students.
Lastly, OER can also help teachers keep their instructional materials stay current. Compared to the traditional hard copy textbooks that K-12 schools usually replace on a multi-year cycle due to huge cost on replacement, teachers can update the content on OER anytime for free. Thus, OER is also particularly handful for teachers who need to meet new standards and instructional goals.
Anyone can search for and engage OER in the 5R activities because OER are made available under open licenses. Creative Commons licenses [https://edtechbooks.org/-qi] are commonly used for giving copyright permissions to the creation of OER. Creators can decide the openness of their OER by having their work licensed under different levels/types of Creative Commons license. Then, OER users need to follow the conditions of the licenses when they engage in the 5R activity. Here is a table showing the six levels/types of Creative Commons license with their conditions:
AttributionCC BY
Attribution-ShareAlikeCC BY-SA
Attribution-NoDerivsCC BY-ND
Attribution-NonCommercialCC BY-NC
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlikeCC BY-NC-SA
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivsCC BY-NC-ND
“Six Types of Creative Commons Licenses [https://edtechbooks.org/-qi]” by Creative Commons [https://creativecommons.org/] is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License [https://edtechbooks.org/-PPo].
“Education is sharing” is the key concept behind OER. While creators of educational resources give their permissions to others for using their original work for free, it is necessary for OER users to give credit to creators and attribute their original work when they reuse, remix, revise, and redistribute the work. In other words, attributing the creative work you used to its original creator is the premise of a respectful and legal use of OER.
Here are examples of an appropriate way to give attribution:
"Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco [https://edtechbooks.org/-WXQ]" by tvol [https://edtechbooks.org/-xCo] is licensed under CC BY 2.0 [https://edtechbooks.org/-pCJ]
"Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco [https://edtechbooks.org/-WXQ]" by tvol [https://edtechbooks.org/-xCo], used under CC BY [https://edtechbooks.org/-pCJ] / Desaturated from original
Remember:
Title? "Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco"
Author? "tvol [https://edtechbooks.org/-xCo]" - linked to his/her profile page
Source? "Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco [https://edtechbooks.org/-WXQ]" - linked to original Flickr page
License? "CC BY 2.0 [https://edtechbooks.org/-pCJ]" - linked to license deed
Title, Author, Source, and License are all noted
Modification? "Desaturated from original"
“Examples of Appropriate Attribution” [https://edtechbooks.org/-VDH] by Creative Commons [https://creativecommons.org/] is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license [https://edtechbooks.org/-Bzq]
More information about OER attribution can be found here: Best Practice for Attribution [https://edtechbooks.org/-VDH]
Here is a list of resources teachers can use to search for OER for teaching, learning, and their own professional development:
Now, you have a general understanding of OER, including its definition, characteristics, and ways of use, let’s begin to practice using OER and engaging in the 5R activities in two ways: