TCCTA 2017: Best Practices with OERs -

NOTE: The following is not an academic paper on the subject of OERs.  I am including notes which I took at a presentation at the 2017 TCCTA Conference in Austin.  I am happy to respond to any questions you might have; just post a comment to this page.


The PowerPoint presentation by Kris Helge can be found on my Learning Web page at the following address:

https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/david.ross/profdev-avatar/oers-and-copyrights-presentation/view

I attended Dr. Kris Helge's (Tarrant County College) presentation on "Best Practices With OERs" to get an idea of what the basic issues are involving these increasingly popular teaching materials. As it is, I learned quite a lot.

1. Definition of OERs: The term "OER" (Open Educational Resources) are characterized by the following features:

• They must be completely free;
• They must be accessible digitally;
• They must include some kind of licensing

2. Creative Commons licenses: The licensing is key to making the OER's really open.  Most OER sites license their works with a version of the Creative Commons license.

The Creative Commons license is usually represented by the letters CC BY, which basically gives you the right to do anything with the material subject to the condition that the the original work by properly attributed to the author.

However, there are a variety of Creative Commons licenses, and Helge gave the following examples:

• CC BY-SA is a license that obliges someone wishing to use the material with modifications to cover it with the same license as the original.
• CC BY-NC prohibits commercial use of the material under license;
• CC BY-ND allows you to use the original material only, with no changes.

Where can OERs be found?  Dr. Helge gave several examples:

One very popular site for us in Houston, and one of the leading publishers of OER material is OpenStax, based in Rice University. OpenStax has two components:

• the OpenStax College, which is basically a list of published OER textbooks, which are available for free in digital form, or as hard-copy textbooks, sold for a nominal cost (typically $20 apiece).
• The OpenStax CNX Library, which is a collection of books and pages developed by authors, but not necessarily published by OpenStax.This library, also known as Connexions, is a database and publishing medium for anyone wishing to author educational materials under an open license. 

In addition to OpenStax, Dr. Helge introduced other OER sites:

• Merlot II, an aggregator of OER and other online teaching material sites.  All material here is peer-reviewed. Not all of it is licensed, the licenses that do exist are visible in the sites. [Here is what appears when you type in the keywords "English" and "Second Language."]
• College Open Textbooks, another aggregator of OER college textbooks. [I found one ESL resource here.]
• OER Commons.  Most materials here are PD (Public Domain), and not all materials are peer reviewed. It also contains a utility for publishing your own materials. [I found 15 ESL items, including what appears to be a textbook series by a veteran ESL teacher from South Seattle Community College]
• The Orange Grove is another aggregator of OER materials, this time from Florida.
• The Getty Open Content Project is a library of open source images.  This can be very useful, since many people have the habit of appropriating images that they come across, without taking account of the fact that these images may be under copyright protection. Dr. Helge noted that images created before 1923 are considered public domain, so the Getty Project is concerned with collecitng images that are more recent than 1923 but may be available as OER images.

The discussion of copyright protection led to a discussion of the issue of the "Fair Use" doctrine, by which copywrite material can be used in an educational context. Dr. Helge stated that there are four factors which determine whether a teacher's use of protected material may be considered "fair use."

1. The purpose of the use (Commercial purposes, of course, are out of bounds);
2. The nature of the item (e.g. unpublished items or highly creative products would not be allowed);
3. The amount of the work that is used (e.g. a page from a chapter would be easier to establish as "fair use" than the entire chapter, or even the entire work)
4. The effect of the "fair use" (e.g. a few copies made from a work one has lawfully purchased would be easier to defend that mass copying of a textbook in lieu of purchasing the textbook.

Dr. Helge made reference to a document in widespread use in libraries around the country to determine whether a specific appropriation of printed material can be considered "fair use."  This is  a checklist developed by the Columbia University libraries:

  Columbia University Library Fair Use Checklist

"Fair use" is not a binary, yes/no decision mechanism.  There are degrees along a continuum between what is clearly acceptable and what is clearly not allowed.  [For example, Teacher A shows a movie to a class in lieu of a lesson (it's the end of the semester, and folks are tuckered out).Probably not good. But Teacher B shows the same movie, stopping every 15-20 minutes to ask the students questions about the language, or having some discussion about the plot.Fine and dandy!] 

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This was the presentation.  I learned a lot, but this presentation also raised in my mind some questions, which have been reinforced by other discussions about OER that I have observed. Here are a few of them:

1. So much of the focus in the discussion about OERs deals with the use of existing products, as if there currently exists an abundant store of high-quality open-source educational materials on virtually any subject.  In fact, publishers such as OpenStax are quite forthright in their declaration that they are concentrating on textbooks for high-enrollment core curriculum courses.  I myself have noted that in our field, ESL, the number of available resources is both quantitatively fewer and qualitatively more diverse than in the high-enrollment fields such as chemistry or psychology or accounting. Therefore, is the OER path as feasible as in other fields?
2. Along the same lines, the discussion of the use of OERs in courses is very demand-oriented - i.e. the books are out there, all we have to do is decide to use them.  But much less time is spent in exploring how to encourage teachers to produce quality instructional materials.  How should such teachers be compensated?  What equity in the resulting intellectual property can teachers claim? These issues are as important as the usage issues.

Introduction and Rationale

The purpose of this blog is to share information which I have gained in my own professional development wanderings.  When I attend a conference, I will endeavor to post through this medium notes and resources taken from the sessions I attend.  I invite colleagues to do the same; if any of you wish to contribute posts, I'll be happy to add you as an author..  Of course, all colleagues are welcome to comment on any of the postings - this may stimulate a welcome conversation about teaching and learning.

I should also point out that not all of the postings I send will be about English as a Second or Foreign Language.  I am interested in a wide variety of subjects, both in the area of language teaching/learning, and in course design, technology & teaching, legislative issues, and many other subjects.

Since the fall of 2015, when the Houston Community College administration announced its intention to provide each full-time faculty member $2000 for professional development, to be spent pretty much the way the individual faculty member wanted to, I have felt that this presents a challenge to all of us to demonstrate that we can use this money not only to enhance our own professional capability, but to raise the professional level of our colleagues as well.

This blog is my effort to meet that challenge.