Anita Walz: Good morning. We’ll get started in just a second.
It's really nice to see lots of folks saying hello in the chat. That's wonderful.
We are going to welcome, receive a welcome from Beverly Rebar at SCHEV.
We have pre-recorded the video.
Kayla, would you go ahead and start the video, please.
Okay. We appear to be having a little bit of technical difficulty.
I’m not quite sure what's going on.
So if we could…
Yes, please.
The video will start very shortly.
We have a welcome from Beverly Rebar from SCHEV.
Thank you.
Beverly Rebar: Good morning.
Welcome to Getting Started with Open Educational Resources.
This session you'll hear this morning is Part 3 of 2020 - 21, webinar series called
Open Education, Student Success and Faculty Autonomy.
My name is Beverly Rebar, and I’m a Senior Associate for Academic and Legislative Affairs
at SCHEV, and one of my great rewarding duties at SCHEV is to coordinate the Open Virginia
Advisory Committee, which has organized this webinar for you today.
State Council of Higher Education for Virginia is the coordinating body for the public higher
education institutions in Virginia.
And in that role, we coordinate a lot of advisory committees.
They're made up of people who have an expertise in a certain area of policy and they're able
to come together and provide SCHEV with input on policy development and how to pursue the
many goals that we have for higher education and how to improve it in the Commonwealth.
Especially in this era where we're starting to come out of a pandemic situation and things
have become more difficult, burdensome for a lot of people who are pursuing higher education,
access and affordability has become more important than ever.
And open resources have been seen by SCHEV as an important strategy for accessing education
and for providing more affordable materials and textbooks, and it’s something that we
do want to see institutions and their faculty promote and for students to be aware of.
We hope that this webinar gives you a good basis for getting started with Open Educational Resources
and also that you'll join us at our future events.
These events will be notified, provided to you by notification by your emails and listed
on our website, of course.
And also through the Open VA listserve, which if you’re not a part of, there should be some information
on the slides accompanying this that will tell you how to sign up.
I would like to thank the members of the Open Virginia Advisory Committee.
The names are listed on the slides as well, and
This particular event is also sponsored by a number of institutions, we thank them for
supporting us, and thanks to you for participating and attending.
I hope you'll find this to be informative, I’ll turn this over to our event moderator,
who will introduce our very special guest speaker.
Thank you.
Anita Walz: Thank you.
Beverly is the coordinator for the Open Virginia Advisory Council of SCHEV, and we want to
thank her even though she cannot be here today.
My name is Anita Walz.
I’m the Assistant Director of Open Education and the Scholarly Communication Librarian
at Virginia Tech.
I'm joined with Preston Davis, who is also here.
And Preston, would you mind introducing yourself briefly?
We are your chat moderators for the event.
Preston Davis: Yes.Thank you, Anita.
My name is Preston Davis, William Preston Davis from Northern Virginia Community College.
I've been involved with OER since 2012 and have worked with this group on the OVAC committee
for quite a few years, and I'm very much looking forward to this session and hopefully answering
many of your questions that you may have in our chat.
Anita Walz: Thank you so Virginia has a long history in both open education and open educational resources
Even with this long history, we want to recognize that there is always a day-one or at least
early days for everyone when learning about OER.
The Open Virginia Advisory Committee selected this presentation topic after review of feedback
on our fall 2020 events.
And while this Getting Started Webinar is primarily for Virginia higher education instructors,
we know that there's broad interest in this topic, so we're pleased to open this event
to a wider audience.
We do listen to your feedback, so please be sure to complete the survey,
especially if you’re from Virginia.
The survey will be shared with you at the end of the event and via email.
Please do take a moment to locate the Q&A function which should be
at the bottom of your screen.
We would love for you to enter questions in this section during the presentation for the
speaker afterwards, because these are viewable by all attendees, an added bonus is that if
you add your questions in the Q&A, someone in the audience might know and maybe willing
to chime in before the end of the presentation.
So please take a moment to locate the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen.
This is a little bit different than the chat function.
The chat function goes only to the panelists.
So please, we’d love for you to share your question with the broader audience.
We'd also like to introduce or to invite you to our April 9th event.
Our next event, which is Listening to OER Stakeholders in Virginia with Spark Open Education
Leadership Program participants, Judy Thomas from the University of Virginia and
Sophie Rondeau from VIVA. You're also welcome to, we'll post the link
to the chat for that.
You're also welcome to visit the SCHEV OVAC events page for recordings of past events.
And, if you're from Virginia, there are two things that we welcome you to do.
One is to join the Open VA listserv, and another is to add your institution's
your Virginia institution’s contributions to OER on the Virginia-specific OER support
and resources for higher ed.
So you'll see Preston and I after Abbey's presentation to moderate some more conversation.
But let's get started with an introduction to our speaker.
So we are pleased today to have Abbey Elder as our guest speaker.
She’s the Open Access and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Iowa State University.
Her work uplifts and supports instructors who are interested in open education,
open access publishing, and other scholarly communication topics.
Abbey’s handbook for instructors, The OER Starter Kit, has been used in professional
development programs across the US and was adapted into a reusable workbook in 2020.
We are delighted to have you here.
Welcome on behalf of SCHEV Open Virginia Advisory Committee.
Thank you for joining us today.
Abbey Elder: Thank you very much, Anita.
So I'll go ahead and share my screen.
There we go.
Can everyone see this?
Anita Walz: Yes.
Abbey Elder: So I'm going to go ahead and get started then.
Welcome everyone.
Like Anita said, this is just an introduction to how to get started with open educational resources,
but hopefully, regardless of whether you're brand new to OER or more of a veteran
in the space, you'll be able to get something out of this presentation that's new for you.
We're gonna have three portions to this:
To adopt OER, how to adapt to OER, and how to create OER for your courses.
But first I'm going to get into a little bit of background.
So why are we having this discussion today?
Open education isn't just about finding these great OER and use them in your classrooms.
You have to understand why we're doing this work at all.
And largely that's because there's a problem in higher education around the cost of education
at large, but specifically around course materials.
A lot of the times when there's new students coming into community colleges and state colleges,
they might be a first-generation student whose family haven't been able to prepare them for
all the costs that come with being in college.
One of those costs that often completely blindside students is the cost of course materials,
because throughout elementary school and high school, they're not forced to buy the books
for their classrooms. They're provided for them.
When they come into college and suddenly they have to account for an extra thing to budget
into their regular learning, then it can be a big surprise for people.
So this often leaves students either not purchasing the books they need for class, putting off
purchasing the books that they need, or even putting off buying groceries or gas or anything
else they need in their life to pay for the books they have for class.
And for the students that can't afford the purchase their books at all, well, they can't
learn from those books, and that means that these students are more likely to have problems
in the classroom, lower grades, and possibly withdrawals from the class itself.
This can have a big impact on our students and costs shouldn't be the barrier that stops
our students from learning.
So how can we deal with this problem?
Well, open educational resources can help.
They're not the only thing that can help, but they can help.
Open educational resources are teaching resources that are free of cost and access barriers
in which also carry legal permissions for open use.
These can be any sorts of educational materials from textbooks to syllabi and everything in
between, so long as they meet those two parameters,
they are free and they have permissions for open use.
What does that mean exactly?
Well, we call them the five R's in OER, because having a fancy name like the five R's makes
things easier to remember and folks in higher education, love making up those sorts of acronyms.
But the five R's are retain, revise, remix, reuse, and redistribute.
And these are the rights that you have over open content to reuse in your classroom.
You can keep a copy for your own use, revise one to make it fit what you need, remix it
by combining it with other materials, reuse it in a different context, or redistributed it,
which means just sharing out copies of the thing that already exists.
These rights are integral to the use of OER because it means that they are actually open
and not just free.
How do you make these rates explicit though?
Well, usually this is done through the use of Creative Commons license or other types
of open source licenses you can use for your content.
I really loved this image from Kelsey Smith in her OER Basics webinar because it really
gets to the heart of the matter.
By default in copyright, you've got copyrighted and not copyrighted content.
As soon as something is created, it is under all rights reserved copyright, which means
the author, creator, or for books more likely the publisher has complete control over the
redistribution, reuse, and adaptation of a work.
Once an author has died and been dead for a very long time in the United States, then
that work goes into the public domain where no rights are reserved and people can do whatever
they wish with it.
Think of it like, the example I like to use is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That work
would not exist if Pride and Prejudice were not in the public domain.
I don't think Jane Austen would've loved it, but it exists because people can do whatever
they want with their work.
Creative Commons is right in the middle where you can choose as an author to reserve some
rights for yourself while giving others away.
This means you don't have to work with people one-on-one, every single time someone wants
to share or adopt your work.
Instead, you can say, I want people to use this.
I want people to adapt it, make translations of my book.
I want people to be able to do more with it.
And these are the specific things I want people to be able to do.
Creative Commons licenses make that clear for other users, so they can provide better
downstream use of your work.
In the same way, it makes it clear what you can do with other people's works when you
want to reuse them in your classroom.
And this is a broad definition for a reason.
So open is free plus permissions.
That means a lot of things, and it's broad because it covers a lot of different types
of content, like I said, it's textbooks, syllabi, and everything in between.
Videos, books, software, any of these might be an open educational resource.
So having a broad definition makes it easier to sort of fulfill all of those different
things within different types of content.
A better question might be then, what isn't an OER?
And that's also sort of a broad topic because
it's anything that doesn't meet those two parameters.
If it's not open, it's not OER.
And if it's not free, it's not OER.
Something can be one or other of those, but still not quite meet the definition.
Here's some examples of things that are commonly misconstrued as being OER when they're actually not.
First is library licensed resources, like you might get through Course Reserves.
They're free to you, but they're not free to everyone in the world
and they're certainly not open.
Second, are blogs and websites.
These are usually free to access but not always open.
Some of them might be.
Images you find on Google, again, you have to check and make sure there's actually an
open license on them to see if they're open.
And finally, open access monographs.
These might be free and open, but if they're under a no derivatives license, that doesn't
allow for remixing, it doesn't meet the five R's requirement for something to be an OER.
But here's where I have this little disclaimer at the bottom of the page.
Just because something isn't an OER that doesn't mean you can't use it in your course.
A lot of the times, the best thing to use for your course is a mix of different
free and open resources.
If it meets your needs, that's the important thing.
The reason that I'm being so careful about defining things here isn't because I don't
want you to use non-OER free resources.
It's because I want to make sure that we're not diluting what the definition of OER is
but that we're clear and concise in how we define what we're using.
Okay, so now I've got a little poll.
If you though, to pollev.com/abbeyelder904 or text this little thing at the top of the
screen for me.
Then you can fill out this poll and explain how much this presentation is new to you.
This is the end of this sort of intro background section,
so I want to get an idea of where you all are.
And hopefully this works if it doesn't work, then we'll move on.
But I'll keep an eye out just in case.
I'll give you one minute.
And if this doesn't actually go anywhere, then we'll go ahead and move on.
Alright.
Oh dang.
That's a real shame.
Let's see if the activate...
There we go.
Okay.
Had to do both at once.
Alright, wonderful.
So this is the first time I've used Poll Everywhere, which is very exciting, but I'm going to give
you five more seconds, and…
Wow.
I guess Poll Everywhere doesn't account for 192 people all being in the presentation,
so we'll go ahead and move on.
But it's nice to see that there's a good spread of people that either know the basics of OER
already or were a little bit familiar with this, but wanted to learn more.
Alright, let's go ahead and move on to the next bit.
There we go.
How do I adopt OER?
So, the rest of this is going to go into how you adopt, create and adapt OER for your classroom.
We've got through the basics now.
So, how do you adopt an OER for your classroom?
You might think that it's as simple as I found a book, I put it in the class, but it's not
always that easy.
So here's some tips.
Before you begin looking for open resources to use in your classroom,
there's two things you need to consider:
What do you need and what you have already?
And this has highlighted the word need because it's not just, well,
what do you think you need, but what do you actually need for your classroom?
Maybe you need a textbook or maybe you just need resources for your students to read.
Maybe you could work with a set of modules, a set of readings, or some other combination
of materials that meet the needs that you specifically have.
The other thing is consider what you have already because a lot of times, faculty members
are coming into OER with a set of resources they've already created, whether those are
notes, slide sets, or other things they already use in that classroom to supplement the commercial
resources they were using before.
You can still use your notes, you don't have to completely get rid of them
when you move to OER.
But you might want to adapt them to match better than material that you're teaching
and the order you're teaching them in with open resources.
Remember, OER can be any educational materials so long as it's freely shared and openly licensed.
So you can look at all the different things available to you instead of thinking just
about open textbooks.
So how do you find OER?
Well, the first place to start is through OER repositories, specifically.
The Open Textbook Library is very popular because it's just textbooks.
Library and elsewhere.
put into a more interactive and remixable format.
LibreTexts is particularly popular with chemistry courses, but they've built out a lot more
recently and they're working on some really interesting, adaptable software.
I won't plug them anymore than that,
but please check them out.
OpenStax, of course is the gold standard for intro textbooks in a lot of courses.
Then there's LibreTexts, which has a lot of resources, both from the Open Textbook
And if you teach psychology, algebra, economics, then you probably have already seen
OpenStax textbooks and use around you.
BCcampus is a wonderful group working in Canada to advance open education, and their
search tool also pulls in a lot of resources in the different repositories here.
And finally, there's OER Commons.
Now, OER Commons is great because it's not just textbooks,
it's any kind of OER that might be in use and available to you.
The one problem was OER Commons, is that it's very popular with K12,
which is great for K12 people.
But it means you have to be more careful in filtering and searching through the content
in it when you're teaching for a college level.
So you don't get a lot of things intended for eighth graders, for example.
So here's the search process.
I generally say for people to go through:
As you're searching for OER, first identify the keywords that you're going to use.
Start with the very broad ones,
so if you teach abnormal psychology, start with psychology, and then branch out from there.
Then, searched very broadly.
Like I said, search places like BC Campus, Google Oasis, which is a metafinder, which
means it pulls in content from multiple repositories in one place
to make it a little easier to pull in content.
And then get more specific with your searches.
Look for very...
Look for just what you would cover in a specific week of your class.
A lot of the times when I say to identify keywords for these parts of your search,
you want to look at the table of contents of the book you're already using in the classroom.
That way you can pull out specific concepts for just one week.
Finally, curate that content into a list that you can use and pull together for your course,
reflect and repeat.
Really it's the same as you would do if you were pulling together a lit review for your
research, you identify what you're looking for, search very broadly,
and then fill in the gaps.
You may find a lot.
My example here is Precalculus 1 because things like Precalculus and other general
education courses have a lot of resources available, and that might mean you have to
curate a little bit more to find exactly what you need.
Or you might find only one or two resources available.
Like this Quantitative Problem Solving in Natural Resources
textbook that one of my faculty members published just a couple of years ago.
Still, regardless of whether you find a lot or a little, you can check back in and see
if more has been published since you last checked.
If you check in regularly for updates, you never know what you might find.
The Open Textbook Library has a new textbook section
where you can see what's been published most recently
I generally say, hey, if you haven't found in OER that works for you,
check back next year, you don't have to adopt fully OER right now.
You can start small and move on from there.
Here's my OER Treasure worksheet for those of you who are interested
in walking through this process yourself.
Basically, it's just a structured view of the search process
I outlined in these slides to help you get together all of your thoughts as you're searching.
And now I'm gonna go back.
So I said earlier, OER can be a lot of things.
And there's a lot of things that are free but not open and they're not really OER.
And I want to come back to that.
You have options when you're adopting OER and your classroom.
You do not have to just go with OER by itself.
You can do other things that are more affordable for your students
and help you take a step in the right direction.
Whether that means using Course Reserves, looking at textbook rentals or older versions
of the textbooks you already assign,
looking at course packs that you can create for your class and more.
There's a lot of ways that you can make your course more affordable and you don't have
to jump all in if there's not an OER that meets your needs right now.
This is not an either/or conversation.
You can adopt some OER while keeping some commercial resources in your classroom as well.
A lot of the time is faculty get started by just adopting ancillary OER
in the classroom where they'll have slides and videos and examples for students.
And then later on, they can build out more comprehensive list of content to fill in the gaps.
Start small, innovate, and grow from there.
Finally, there's open educational practices.
When you're adopting OER, you're also adopting a type of teaching that's specific to OER.
You can replace your textbook then open one, leave it at that,
but you can also look at different ways of working with OER, either by
integrating ancillary resources as self-study materials in your classroom,
using open pedagogy to create OER with your students,
or doing research on OER and their impacts as well.
Open Education isn't just the resources.
It's a whole ecosystem of teaching and learning that has a lot of specifics to it.
And I'm not going to go into it, but I want you to think about that as you're moving on today.
Part 2: How do I create OER?
So we've talked about adopting, and creating is a lot more complex for a lot of reasons.
A lot of faculty members don't have the time to create open content for their classrooms,
but I'm going to talk about some tips, tricks, and tools for you to get started
if this is something you want to pursue.
The first thing I want to talk about is considerations for getting started.
Before you get started with creating an OER, ask yourself a few questions:
Who is your audience?
If you're writing for a set of undergraduate students, particularly, first-year students,
you have to be sure that you're writing at the right level for them.
A lot of us, as people writing in academia,
get used to writing for our peers, writing research articles that
cater to people with the same understanding of the content as we have.
But when you're writing for a student audience, you have to take things back a step and think
about how you express things to them on a personal level.
Second, what learning objectives do you need to meet?
A lot of the time, we're again, used to using commercial textbooks
that cover a whole lot of content, some of which we skip over in class or ignore all together.
Think about what learning objectives in your class you actually want to focus on,
and make sure that what you're creating meets those needs and doesn't
go beyond that unless you really want to have a teaser section for students
to learn more if they want to.
Third, what training do you need?
So if you're working with a new software that you're not used to, or if you're building
something out that you want to be more interactive, make sure that you can get the training you need
to do this work well and to build something that you know is going to be great.
Finally, what support is available for you?
I'll talk a little bit later about the support available in Virginia.
I know based on the chat, a lot of you aren't from Virginia, but hopefully you'll have some
fun things to share as well later.
Again, this is not a comprehensive guide, I could do a whole one-hour workshop on just creating OER.
So this is going to walk you through the basics.
What you do will depend heavily on the resources available to you, what support you have, what
software you have, and what your institution has available to help you out with this.
But this will give you some tips.
First, creation tools. The tips for using different tools for creating content is to
use what you have and use what you know.
Now, a lot of the time people talking about creating OER, will list off the most popular things.
Use your LMS like Canvas or Blackboard, use Pressbooks, use Overleaf.
But if you know Word very well and you are used to writing in Word,
draft your content in Word.
You do not have to learn something brand new just for drafting your content.
If you have something that you're used to working in, start there.
You can always adapt and move content into another platform later if that's what's best for you
And again, use what you have available.
If something is recommended for you to use, but you don't have access to it,
it's not worth paying extra money just to use a different software that someone recommends.
Instead, use the things that are free, open, and available to you.
Or if it's available to you, but not free to someone else, use what someone else has already bought for you.
Another thing to think about, besides just where you're creating your content,
is where you're hosting and sharing your content.
And these might be two different things.
So, like I said before, you can create your content in one tool
and then post it somewhere else.
Similarly, you can host your content in one place and share it somewhere else.
The Open Textbook Library is an example of a referatory,
which means it refers and points out to content that's hosted elsewhere.
So you can have a textbook that's hosted on your institutional repository's website,
like Virginia Tech does, but you can have it linked in the Open Textbook Library
so more people can find it.
A lot of the time this has done in OER contexts to make it easier to find
resources that are housed all over the world.
So what are some hosting and sharing tools you should be aware of?
Well, there's Pressbooks, which is very popular for both hosting and creating content.
You can write within it, and you can host your content there.
There's LibreTexts, as I mentioned earlier, which can also host and create content.
Although, I generally recommend creating elsewhere and then pulling into LibreTexts later.
WordPress websites can also be a very popular,
especially for courses that are housed outside of your LMS.
Finally, there's your LMS itself. Your learning management system,
whether this is Canvas or Blackboard.
And OER Commons. VIVA Open has its own OER Commons hub where you can host content you
created using the OER Author tool or share out links to content that's housed elsewhere.
Similarly, you can host content somewhere that wasn't created there,
like in your institutional repository or Manifold, which is a software similar to
Pressbooks, but instead of creating the content within it, it's a place to share it out.
And like I said earlier, you've got referatories like the Open Textbook Library and OER Commons.
Here's some considerations as you're planning out your projects.
Like I said earlier, you need to think about what you have available, what tools you want
to use, and how you're going to structure it for your class,
but you also have to think about the content itself.
How are you creating this content and making sure that it's usable for not just your class,
but anyone in the world who wants to access it.
This is going to be an open educational resource,
remember, which means it has to be usable for whoever finds it.
Someone might be able to adapt it down the line to make it better,
but don't you want your version of it to be
the version that everyone says is the best?
So things to think about as you're planning your project: aim for interoperability, which
means having a modular, customizable design that aims to make something easy for people
to integrate into their classroom design.
Second, digital accessibility.
Obviously we want to build everything accessibly from the very start of your project.
No matter what you're doing, you don't want accessibility to be the last thing you do
because that means you're going to have to go in and change things later on.
Instead, start with an accessibility coordinator on your campus, an IT person that works with
accessibility, and make sure they're helping you keep these things
in the front of your mind as you're building your content.
And finally, sustainability.
Think about what you're going to do to update your work in the future and what support you
can get to make that happen.
There is something called the ALMS Framework created by David Wiley.
The same man that came up with the five Rs, and the ALMS Framework is basically just the
idea of how you courage downstream use of your OER by making it even more open.
First of these is "Access to Editing Tools." Is the content published with something that
can be edited afterwards and available in a format that can be revised?
Whether that's the only format that's available in or whether there's an extra format available there as well.
I generally recommend you have one example that's well-formatted good for printing,
and another format that's good for remixing.
That way you don't have to sacrifice looks for functionality.
Second, Level of Expertise Required.
How hard is it going to be for some to revise and remix your content?
If you have a version of it available in Word, that makes it a lot easier for other
people remix rather than, if the only version you have available was made in Adobe Illustrator, for example.
Is it Meaningfully Editable? Which means it's not just easy to take a page out,
but it's also easy to change around the sections of your book or even rearrange it.
And finally, is it Self-Sourced?
So is the format preferred for consuming the open content
also the preferred version for revising and remixing it?
This is where formats like Pressbooks and LibreTexts are particularly useful
because they're online software that you can use to access
content and also copy, remix, and put out your own versions of it within the same platform.
But the most important thing you can do when you're creating content isn't to think about
all these things by yourself and figure out how you're going to do all of this hard work.
The best thing to do is to ask for help early and often.
Seek help on campus for copyright and accessibility experts.
Talk to instructional designers, librarians, and OER professionals, and use the support
available in your community, so you're not going at this alone.
To identify a system or campus leaders in your area, go to bit.ly/va-oer-contacts
that will help you find a few people that are OER experts in Virginia near you.
And also, get help in other ways. You don't have to just get support from people.
You can also get support from money. And I know we all need that for a lot of this work.
So funding and content hosting, are both available thanks to the 4-VA grants, VIVA grants,
and other support that's available in your community.
One thing I highly recommend is reaching out to listservs for support,
whether you're in Virginia or not.
For Virginia, obviously, there's the VIVA OER and OpenVA listservs.
But outside of Virginia, you might look at the LibOER listserv, the CCC OER listserv,
which is community colleges in California, but they're great for everyone to talk to.
These groups can help you locate OER.
They can help you talk through your project.
And it's a great community of practice to talk to other people that are interested in this work.
And finally, again, institutional support might be available for you as well.
Ask, reach out for help, and see what's available.
Alright.
So that's the basics of creation, and like I said, it is not comprehensive at all.
It's just the very basics, but I want you to think more about how
creation doesn't just have to be something that you do with a whole lot of effort on your own.
It can be something where you take it a piece at a time,
figure out what you need to do, and then get help to do that work well.
So finally, how do I adapt OER?
And you might be thinking, usually this is structured: adopt, adapt, create.
But in this case, this is structured: adopt, create, adapt,
and that's because adaptation is a lot of the same stuff in creation, but with a twist.
So, I wanted to get the basics of creation out first.
So how do you adapt OER?
Like I said, there are five R permissions included in all OER:
You can retain them, revise, remix, reuse, and redistribute.
But that revise and remix is very important because it's the basis of adaptation.
It means you can take something that exists and make it work in your context.
There are a few reasons you might adapt a resource,
but before you begin, there's also some considerations you have to keep in mind.
First, what needs to be changed versus what do you want to change?
Second, what software and tools do you have at your disposal?
What training do you need to do this work well?
And what support is available for your work?
So this should sound familiar because it's the exact same questions,
well two or three of them, that I had in the creation section.
When you're adapting content, you often have to think of it the same way as creating
because you're creating something new out of something that already exists.
But there are some differences.
Approach adaptation, like editing.
Whenever I talk to faculty about adaptation, I often get a little bit of concerns from
people saying, "I don't know how comfortable I feel changing something that someone else made."
But after remind them, you're not changing that version of the text.
You're making a new edition for your class.
Think of it like changing a draft to someone else's prepared for you.
It's not that someone said,
"This is my work and it's all mine, and I don't want to share it with anyone."
No, they made it open because they want to support students around the world
in learning this content well.
Don't be afraid to make those changes.
You're adapting it for your course because there's something that needs to be changed.
And once you have created an adaptation, if it's small or if it's big,
reach out to the original author and share your work.
Say, "I really loved what you created, but I needed to change some things for my class."
"Here's my edition in case you want to adapt some of it for your own use."
This is how collaboration works.
And finally, always give attribution. Technically, it's the law.
So you have to provide attribution for the original creator for any changes you make
to their work in your own updates.
Attribution is the basis of all OER reuse.
And a lot of the time it's something that faculty aren't necessarily ready to jump into,
even if it seems like they're ready for everything else.
Here's an example.
Taken straight from Creative Commons website.
When you create an attribution for a source, there's a few things you need to include:
the title of the work, the author, the source link, and the license.
That way anyone looking at it can immediately find out where it came from and
what license it's used under.
It's the exact same thing as citations, except with a much heavier legal emphasis.
You can forget to cite something and people will say, "That's all right I know where that cam from."
But if you forget to attribute something that you've specifically taken from someone else,
that can be a legal problem.
Again, providing links is one of the most important things because
it helps users find that original work.
So what can you change when you're doing an adaptation of a work?
Well, you can change the format.
Let's say you found an OER that's a PDF,
but you really want it to be an e-book to make it easier for students
with digital accessibility needs to read through it.
Let's say, you want to do updates.
You found something from 2014, and things have changed
a little bit in your field since then, so you just need to tweak a bit.
You want to add something.
There's a chapter missing that you teach in your class,
and you want to make sure that's included.
You can delete something.
Again, the complete opposite, take out the chapter you don't teach.
You could add different things for accessibility, like alt-text to images,
or you could completely translate and change the language of a text,
My OER Starter Kit we mentioned at the beginning of this is currently being translated into French.
So that might be something useful for you as well.
And why might you make these changes?
I think this is perhaps even more important because it can be easy to say,
"I want to make a change to a book."
But before you make changes to a book, a video, and an interactive resource that's an OER,
you have to think about why you're doing it.
Because, if it's not a good enough reason to make those changes,
maybe you should just use it as is and adapt it like you would a commercial resource,
where you tell students, "Just don't read chapter three."
Why you might change a resource is because it improves ease of access for students.
It can help you produce print copies if necessary.
It can better align with your course learning objectives.
You can have better DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion
of the materials by changing examples to have the same sort of names
that are present in your own student body.
Or I just don't teach that chapter in this class.
That's also good enough reason.
Small changes can make for big results.
Sometimes, all you need to do is tweak a little bit to really make a big change in your community.
Like I said, thinking about how to make diversity and equity changes to a textbook
can make your students feel more involved and included in the classroom.
Think about what you can do, even if it's something small, to make an OER work for you.
Finally, I'm going to talk about two types of adaptation projects you might have.
First is remixed projects.
It's when you take multiple resources and combine them with your own
to make something new.
Or you might combine two resources to fill a gap identified in one.
This textbook is almost perfect, but this one fills in that one specific thing we cover.
Put them together and make something else.
Or you can take multiple resources from all over and create a reader or a resource list
by taking chapters and articles and compiling them into an open course pack.
A lot of you are used to maintain course packs already by taking readings from your library
and creating a course pack for students to purchase.
This is the same thing, except it's also open and free.
Re-mixing can happen in a lot of different ways.
And you don't have to just take something,
one thing that exists and adapt it for your class.
You can take a lot of different resources to make something unique and perfect for you.
Another type of adaptation project are open pedagogy projects,
and I mentioned this a little bit earlier.
But open pedagogy is sort of a way of adapting during your class instead of before or after it.
As I define it here, open pedagogy is the process of engaging students in the co-creation
of content as part of their learning.
Either as a way of demonstrating learning or as a way of encouraging it.
Students can annotate, comment on, suggest edits to an open resource,
or create the open resource as part of their learning.
There's a lot of different ways you can do this,
and I recommend checking out openpedagogy.org for some examples
of how this has been done in other classes.
All right, we're nearing the very end of my presentation now.
So I'm just going to go into the key takeaways from what we've talked about today.
First, you have options.
You do not have to fully integrate your course with all OER to adopt resources like this.
You can adopt, adapt, or create content for your course, and
you can adopt to some OER without going all in.
Second, start broad when you're searching for open content, and then expand your search
to very specific things, like what you cover in week four, what you cover in week five.
See what might be available there that can supplement what you use already.
Third, use the resources already at your disposal.
You might already have a large amount, of course notes that you could publish as an OER,
or that you could adopt for your course in addition to open content.
And finally, you don't have to do this work alone.
There's often a lot of support people on your campus, that want to help you
and to do this right.
I'm one of those people where whenever someone reaches out to me for help,
I get very excited because I think you didn't need to get money to do this.
I can help you as much as I possibly can.
I will be the point person to help you get your project done.
They are likely people who are excited and energetic and happy to do this work with you
to be a collaborator on your project and make it work.
Find those people, and help them help you.
You can learn more using The OER Starter Kit we mentioned, again, at the beginning
of this presentation.
I like to plug my own work just because I didn't put a lot of work into it.
It's the basic overview of the sorts of things I covered today:
What are OER? How do licenses work?
How do you create them? And things of that sort.
Check it out if you want to learn a bit more.
And now, share your questions.
We'll go ahead and go into the Q&A in the chat to see what you have questions about,
and answer them as best I can.
You can access my slides through this Bitly link here.
Anita Walz: Thank you so much Abbey.
This is an incredible presentation for people who are new to open educational resources.
We've had a number of questions in the Q&A.
Thank you very much for those of you who have added those and others that have answered them.
I have a couple of questions as we're waiting for some more people to ask specific things,
but what how would you describe to someone who is new to Open Educational Resources
and looking at a resource... How do you know what you're looking at?
How do you know if it's open? If it's in copyright?
What steps would you suggest going through to determine what you're looking at and what
you might be able to do with it?
Abbey Elder: Yeah. That's a great question because a lot of the time when you're finding something,
especially if it's a website that you're looking at or a more interactive resource,
it can be hard to notice: Is this something that's openly licensed?
It might be free and you know it's free because you got access to it.
But being able to pull that apart specifically can take some more time.
Not all the time are you going to have a big CC-BY icon right on the top of your page.
So in those cases, I say to look around and see if you can find a marker that says
Creative Commons or that explains what license something is under.
Whether it's on the last page of a PDF or on the bottom of the website.
There might even be an about us page that explains everything on this website
is licensed a certain way. That can help you answer that question.
Other things I might consider is checking out things that might be signs that something
is clearly not open or free, but is shared in a free way.
I've seen a lot more recently, people asking questions about content shared on illegal
textbook sharing websites and asking, "Is this an OER? It's a free textbook."
But if you look up the name and just do a little bit of digging, you can see that it's
actually a commercial textbook that was illegally torrented and uploaded to this website.
So, if you're on a real OER repository that shouldn't happen.
But if people are asking around about something, or you found something randomly through a
Google search, just dig into it a little bit more, and double-check
that it does have a clear open license.
Anita Walz: Thank you.
So there are some questions here in the Q&A and also in the chat.
I'm wondering if you can tell us, How do you attribute?
If you're using somebody else's work, what are you required to do
by a Creative Commons license in order to be fully above board?
Abbey Elder: Yeah. Very good point.
So if you're doing an adaptation of one book that you're using as the base
for a new thing that you're putting out, then it's best to have the author of the original
listed as a co-author on the final book and to have, on one of the very first pages,
"This was adapted from 'the other book' by this author, available at this link."
The same TALS acronym of title, author, source, and license
that I mentioned earlier.
Someone mentioned in the Q&A, when I combine material from multiple sources
in an adaptation, what's the standard way of writing attribution part?
That will depend again, on how much of each one you're using.
If one of those books is the base for the whole thing, then you'll again,
want to make sure that that author is listed as a co-author on the project,
very upfront because they're the one that did the bulk of the work,
and that they're attributed clearly at the very front page.
And then any other pieces that are adapted into the text are under adaptations.
You can have a separate page saying adapted from and a list of resources,
or you can have them under each chapter or page that their content is used within.
Anita Walz: Let's see. Let's take one of the questions from the Q&A.
Once you adopt a specific Creative Commons license, for example, Attribution Only,
and you're the author, can you change it?
What happens? And could you change it?
And what would that entail?
Abbey Elder: Yeah. Very good question.
So that specific question is something that I hear about a lot when people are just learning
and getting started with open licensing their own work because it can be very scary
to make something very open and then want to go back on that later.
But legally, a Creative Commons license is irrevocable.
Once it's attached to your work, it's attached to your work forever.
But if you create a second edition of that work, that's separate from the original,
then you can license it under a different license.
You just can't change the license on the original work once it's out.
It would be like saying,
"I put this book out, and it's completely under my copyright."
"And now I'm taking that all back. I don't want the copyright anymore,
and I'm changing it completely."
Once it's out, that's how it is, but you can put out a different license after the fact
if you have a second edition or an alternate version of the text.
Anita Walz: Thank you.
Can you tell us if a faculty member wants to put an open license on their work,
what would they need to do to do that?
Do you have to apply somewhere?
Abbey Elder: Very good question. Yes. I get that a lot as well.
Ok, again I'm going to point everyone if you want to, to the Creative Commons website.
It is very nice. They've had a lot of very clear answers to this,
and I am not a lawyer. There you go.
I've said it once, but I can answer this pretty well.
If you want to put a Creative Commons license on your work,
there's a couple of steps you can follow.
First of all, put that there is a Creative Commons license on this work
somewhere in the text of it.
That have the icon for whatever creative commons license you're using available.
And if possible, if you can get help with this as well, put in the metadata of the file,
for whatever you're sharing, the information for
the open license you're using as well.
You do not have to go through an office. There's no US Copyright Office process
for making something openly licensed.
It's just a matter of making it clear and present within the item itself,
So that other people looking at it, can clearly see this is openly licensed,
just like how you'd want to be able to see by looking at something if you can reuse it.
Anita Walz: So does that mean that I put words or the icon and for CC license or both, or...
Abbey Elder: Ideally both.
Anita Walz: Great. I think Preston wants to jump in with a couple of questions.
Preston Davis: So yes thank you.
There's a question about finding images for lab manuals.
And specifically, if you know if pictures of models are allowed
to be used in an OER text.
Abbey Elder: That's one of those weird cases where I think it would depend on the model
and how... its one of those things... how gung-ho the company
that owns the models and the rights to them are about enforcing those rights.
I don't want to say, "as long as they don't care, it's fine."
But there is a fair use case to be made for having a picture of something that exists
in a physical form that you took the picture of and are using under that right.
There might be the need to say within the text,
this is a picture of a copyrighted physical thing, but it's being used under fair use
or the picture itself is openly licensed, but the item is not.
This is where I would have to say talk to a real lawyer
and not me on this one.
Preston Davis: Yeah, that's a tough question.
And we have another question about when I combine materials from multiple sources
in the adaptation process, what is the standard way of writing the attribution?
Abbey Elder: I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but it will depend on
how much of each one is in the book.
Another example, when it's not one book is the main piece of it.
But you have a lot of little things that are being added into something
that's bulk your work, is to have an attribution on each page
that is made with something else.
We have a textbook that was just put out by one of our authors,
Parenting and Family Diversity Issues, that's the one, through Iowa State,
where she took a lot of resources from Wikipedia, from existing open textbooks and combines them
on different chapters of the book into something new.
so instead of having one long page of attributions at the front of the book,
she had a footnote on every single page saying here are the resources that were
adapted for this page, so you can easily get back to those resources.
Anita Walz: I'm going to jump in with a question.
You mentioned something about no derivatives. Can you explain what that is?
Abbey Elder: Thank you.
There are different specific licenses under Creative Commons, from the very basic CC BY
which is just, you can do whatever you want as long as you provide attribution for me
to the very strict no derivatives and noncommercial which says, you can't sell it,
you can't share it, maybe you can show people it, but you can't change it anyway.
And no derivatives is just the license that says no changes, no adaptations.
And that's the one licensed by and large the OER community will say, you can't put on an OER
because it doesn't allow the five R permissions.
Every other creative commons license though, should be allowed in used as necessary.
Anita Walz: Thank you . The questions keep coming. This is great.
They keep getting harder too which is also exciting.
So one person wants to know what if I used an open source in my country,
but it was not open for another country?
I think this person is asking something that was...
Actually, let's clarify what this person is asking. I'll just ask them to please clarify.
There's another question about who owns what?
So if you're at an institution, does university or college own what you made,
do you own it? Can you put an open license on it, and Preston actually added an answer to that one.
Do you want to elaborate, Preston?
Preston Davis: Well, I think at each institution is going to have an intellectual property policy.
The policies can differ from institution to institution.
That being said, It's important to take into account what is the institutional policy?
I would say in general terms, faculty retain ownership in most cases,
but institutions maintain usage rights in most instances.
Again, it can be dependent upon the actual policy that the institution had.
I think that's the best way that I can answer the question,
not being a lawyer.
Anita Walz: I think that's probably accurate.
It depends on the institutional policy.
Instructors usually have some rights, but let's talk about student rights.
So at my institution, we revised our IP policy three or four years ago to
very clearly indicate that students own the intellectual property over their work,
if they are not if they're not compensated for the work.
And so student work, you would have to either compensate to obtain permission
and to allow students to be able to opt out without an academic consequences.
So there's a question in that has six up votes in the Q&A.
How do you balance wanting to help students with not wanting to provide intellectual,
free intellectual labor to the higher education industry?
I think the answer to that is to ask permission with no strings attached, or to see if you
can pay students to do some of the work. So student should have an option.
I'm answering that for you. Sorry. Is there anything that you would add to that, Abbey?
Abbey Elder: There was a bit more I think to that question about wanting to create OER,
but not wanting to give something free to other people to reuse.
The answer is under it I think did a very good job of saying, you can use
a non-commercial CC license.
You don't have to put it out and say the work your used
can be reused however they like.
Also you can get paid for your work as well. Depending on your institution, you might be
able to get funding to support the creation of open content,
or if there's content you've already created, then this is just a good way of getting it
out and getting some more impact for your work.
There's a lot of people right now looking into promotion and tenure, support for faculty
adopting and using OER.
So that might be another way to compensate people doing this work in the future, even
if it's not, at your institution, a big thing right now.
Anita Walz: Great. Thank you for that. There are a few other questions.
Are there special considerations for creating or adapting multimedia OER materials?
So where there are presenters, but there is audience participation.
This is a new world of online... the old, new world of online learning.
and incorporating people's work into an OER.
I think what I would see behind that is,
do we need to get permission from people who are involved, who are contributing ideas?
How would you, how would you answer that question?.
Abbey Elder: That's a really big question, I'll say. Specifically, before the example was included
and I just saw the world of multimedia OER, I was thinking, yeah, that's very complicated
because there's a lot more accessibility concerns to keep in mind this multimedia content,
you have to put more into the transcripts, the captions, the descriptions for interactive content,
like PhET sims, simulations, and things like that.
But then when you look at events that are being shared,
that's a whole other sort of situation.
And I think it's a case where you have to, upfront, have a code of conduct,
and an expectation for participants to understand what's being asked of them.
For example, a lot of events at my institution, if we're going to be recording, we let people
know what the very front, we're going to be recording this session.
This is what to expect from that.
And if you would rather not be recorded and not have your face or name shown, let us know.
We might decide for this one to only put out notes from the session instead of the full
recording because of that.
It's a big balancing act, and I want to really quickly take that back to something
you mentioned, Anita, which is the question of student created work and open licenses.
Because that's one of the biggest things about open pedagogy when you're considering that
for your classroom, that you want to keep in mind, is giving students the choice whether
or not to openly license their work because they are the creative...
creators of the things that they're putting out into the world.
And even if you're having them create OER as part of an assignment, that they should
be able to choose whether or not what they're making is shared out more publicly.
Now you can make it clear to them why that's important and why you think that that's a
valuable thing for them to do, but coercing or expecting something to be open,
outside of what a student might want to do, can often make them more averse
to working with you in the future rather than giving them the option and
possibly making a better learning environment for everyone involved.
Anita Walz: Great. Thank you.
So if someone were starting out in creating OER, what advice do you think
would be really critical for them? What would you encourage them to do first?
Abbey Elder: The first thing that I would encourage them to do is to
learn those basics of the Creative Commons licenses and types of OER and where you can find them
before you decide to jump into any one specific thing.
A lot of the time faculty members applying through even grants at our institution
want to create something that already exists, and maybe if they had done a slightly
deeper dive beforehand, they might've learned, there's something that's already basically here.
I can just adapt that instead, or I was going to pay someone to do this work
when we have staff on hand to support this kind of thing already.
So I think the two things would be getting a good grasp of the basics and understanding
understanding what support is available in your community.
Because that'll give you a good stronghold for what you wanna do and how you can do it
moving forward.
Anita Walz: So we have a question.
Preston Davis: So, I was actually looking to try to type an answer for that question, but
Abbey Elder: It's a big one.
Preston Davis: It's a tough question. So, I'm going to just read this out and
maybe we all have our $0.02 to add to this, but...
For somebody who teaches in the medical field, we see patients and they give us permission
via sign documentation to picture their pathology for teaching purposes without
patient identifying data.
Any idea how this would work for OER material? Should we modify our documentation
to obtain broader patient permission?
I don't want to be the first one to answer this question.
Abbey Elder: I can go ahead. I would say there's two ways to look at it:
The first is you're already asking for permission to use something for teaching purposes, and
that's what OER is.
So that might actually cover it.
But the second is because something that's OER is fully open and accessible to anyone
to use, regardless of the purposes, then you might want to just put in an extra note that
this is going to be openly licensed.
Often the easiest way to explain it to people is to call it open source, even if that's
not what it is.
But similar to how in the medical field you might have something written out, how it actually
is, but told to someone how they might understand it better.
Having a quick explanation of what that means for the extra
permissions is the easiest way to get that out of the way.
Preston Davis: I'm glad to hear you say that because that was very similar to my thinking
in terms of how I think the documentation should be as clear as possible as to
how that information would be used, so it's always good to update the language.
But the fact that permission was given should protect you currently.
But I would encourage you to make sure that you're being as as clear and comprehensive
as possible in terms of how you may be using that information.
Abbey Elder: A very good question just came in the Q&A, which is a factor I noticed in adopting OER:
the availability of courseware. Where do we look for open courseware?
For example, for math.
I know Sage Math is very popular. I'll say that as an open source mathematics software.
My Open Math is one you mentioned as well. There are also question banks available.
You often have to look a little bit closer because it's not going to be very easy to
find just because faculty don't want to make question banks the easiest thing in
the world for their students to locate.
But if you reach out to people creating in My Open Math or in Sage Math
and say, do you have something that you're willing to share?
Then they might have something already set aside to share it with other faculty.
It might just not be as easy to find as say, a lesson plan, where it's more up to you,
how you use it and less... cheat bait. You know?
Anita Walz: Great. We are at time. This has been a delight to hear from you
and to have you, Abbey, field some of our questions. Thank you very much for being here and for doing this.
We have an end of event survey.
We'd love to love to hear from you all.
On behalf of SCHEV's Open Virginia Advisory Committee,
Thank you very much.
We look forward to seeing some of you at our future events.
I'm going to also put in the chat a link to... if I can find the right page,
a link to the page where our recordings will be.
And you can see past recordings of past events.
The recording from this event will be on that page as well as in addition to a list of the
links that we talked about in the session and thank you very much,
Happy Open Education Week. Happy Friday.
We look forward to seeing all the great things each of you does with this material. Thanks very much.