3 Using open educational resources

3.1 Introduction

This section of the course focuses on where you can find open resources, what factors might influence your choice, how to attribute a resource and the importance of how you remix to provide the best possible experience for learners.

3.2 Where can I find OER?

Open educational resources (OER) can be found in many places, but it is not always immediately obvious where to find material that gives you explicit permission to reuse it or how to find the most relevant material for your context. Some of the more familiar places to find resources, such as Flickr, YouTube or Google, include filters so that you can show only openly licensed images or videos.

For example, when you are searching for an image on Google you can choose to see images with specific types of permissions for their reuse. To do this, once you have searched for a particular image, go to the ‘Search tools’ tab and choose ‘Labeled for reuse’ before selecting what type of licence you would like to see.

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Figure 3.1 ‘Google search by license’ (Beck Pitt, CC-BY), based on a search of www.google.co.uk

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This is a screenshot of the Google search engine. At the top of the picture is the search box which has the word ‘seaside’ in it. Underneath this is a row of headings as follows: ‘All’, ‘Images’, ‘Maps’, ‘News’, ‘Videos’, ‘More’, and ‘Search tools’.

Underneath this is a further rule of headings as follows: ‘Size’, ‘Colour’, ‘Type’, ‘Time’, ‘Labelled for reuse‘, ‘More tools’, and ‘Clear’.

The heading ‘Labelled for reuse’ shows a drop-down menu as follows:

• ‘Not filtered by license’
• ‘Labelled for reuse with modification’
• ‘Labelled for reuse’ with a tick to the left-hand side
• ‘Labelled for noncommercial reuse with modification’
• ‘Labelled for noncommercial reuse’

In the background of the picture are 3 images of the seaside.

Figure 3.1 ‘Google search by license’ (Beck Pitt, CC-BY), based on a search of www.google.co.uk

There are two ways to find openly licensed videos on YouTube. When searching for videos you can choose to add a range of different ‘filters’, and this includes ‘Creative Commons’ as a ‘Feature’ of the type of video you are seeking.

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Figure 3.2 ‘YouTube filters’ (Beck Pitt, CC-BY), based on https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Gxi78MxbdX0

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This is a screenshot from YouTube showing the search filters.

At the top of the screenshot is the search box. In the search box is the word ‘dancing’. To the right of the search box is the phrase ‘About 333,000 filtered results’.

Underneath this there are 5 columns as shown in the table below:

Upload date	Type	Duration	Features	Sort by
Last hour	Video	Short (	4K	Relevance
Today	Channel	Long (>20 minutes)	HD	Upload date
This week	Playlist		Subtitles/CC	View count
This month	Film		Creative Commons X	Rating
This year	Programme		3D
			Live
			Purchased
			360°

The ‘Creative Commons’ feature has an ‘X’ marked against it; this has been circled in red and has a red arrow pointing to it. [These details have been added on top of the screenshot and are not part of the website].

Underneath all of this on the right-hand side is the phrase ‘Clear all filters’.

Figure 3.2 ‘YouTube filters’ (Beck Pitt, CC-BY), based on https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Gxi78MxbdX0

However, you can also see what kind of licence an individual video carries. As you can tell from the licensing information provided in Figure 3, this video is available for reuse can be edited and remixed on YouTube.

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Figure 3.3 ‘YouTube licensing’ (Beck Pitt, CC-BY), based on https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Gxi78MxbdX0

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This is a screenshot from YouTube. It shows the part of the page with the information about the video.

At the top of this screenshot is the title ‘Josie Fraser: Connecting Open Practice (9 March 2016)’. Underneath this on the left-hand side is a small orange radial and the phrase ‘Open Research Hub’. Underneath the phrase is a box containing a tick with the word ‘subscribed’ and the number ‘54’. Underneath this are three buttons, the first button is labelled ‘Add to’, the second is labelled ‘Share’ and the third is labelled ‘…More’. On the far-right-hand side there is the phrase ‘31 views’; there is a dividing line underneath this and below that there is a thumbs-up symbol with the numeral ‘1’ beside it, and a thumbs down symbol with the numeral ‘0’ beside it.

Below all of this is a further box containing the following text:

‘Published on 14 March 2016

Keynote speaker at the OEPS forum 4, Stirling on 9 March 2016, Josie Fraser on connecting open practice.

Slides for Josie’s presentation are available here: http://slideshare.net/JosieFraser...

Category Education

Licence Creative Commons Attribution Licence (reuse allowed)

Remix this video’

Underneath all of this is the phrase ’SHOW LESS‘.

Figure 3.3 ‘YouTube licensing’ (Beck Pitt, CC-BY), based on https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Gxi78MxbdX0

You can find more detailed instructions on how to find OER on Google and YouTube and other platforms in this presentation by the ROER4D project: ‘How and where to find OER’ or by looking at Glasgow Caledonian University’s guide to finding Creative Commons licensed images.

Figure 3.4 ‘Solvonauts logo’ (Solvonauts, CC-BY)

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This picture shows an astronaut’s helmet containing a triangle, containing the words in black writing ‘ourvrir’, ‘abrir’ and ‘open’ down either side of the triangle. Underneath this is written 'Solvonauts' in blue writing and to the right-hand side of this, rotated 180 degrees, are the words ‘abrir’ and ‘open’. Above ‘abrir’ is Chinese script and below ‘open’ is Arabic font.

Figure 3.4 ‘Solvonauts logo’ (Solvonauts, CC-BY)

There are also specific repositories that only contain OER. Whilst JORUM, the UK-based repository for sharing OER across all sectors is no longer maintained, other collections are available, such as the College Development Network’s site. OpenCNX (formerly Connexions) is a repository of OER where learners and educators can share and remix materials. The OER Quality project has created and crowdsourced a list of repositories around the world, and members of their project have been involved in creating a map of repositories.

You could also explore searchable and curated spaces offered by OER Commons or the European Commission’s Open Education Europa portal.

Sometimes it can be difficult to find the resource you need for your own learning, or to help others. In the instance of OpenLearn, The Open University’s OER repository teams in Scotland and Wales have created themed ‘learning pathways’ to help learners navigate their way through materials, develop their interest in a particular area and build their confidence, whilst introducing them to higher education (HE) study. You can read more about how the Pathways programme was developed in Scotland and Wales. Helping learners navigate their way through materials is an important factor in enabling effective learning, and Section 3.5 on curation will look at this in more depth.

Figure 3.5 ‘Open Pathways’ (OEPS, CC-BY-NC-SA)

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This picture has a background which is the blue sky, with two airplane trails which create a white St Andrews Cross (an ‘X’) across the image from corner to corner. Over the top of this in the left hand corner is the text ‘Open Pathways to Higher Education’. ‘Open pathways’ is written in yellow, and ‘to Higher Education’ is written below it in white. In the right hand corner of the picture is the logo of of the Open University in Scotland. This is a rounded shield, with a small circle cut out of the top right hand corner, beside the shield on the right is written ‘The Open University’ and underneath the shield is written ‘Scotland’.

Figure 3.5 ‘Open Pathways’ (OEPS, CC-BY-NC-SA)

3.3 Choosing a resource

The last section gave suggestions for how and where to find content. If you are facilitating learning, looking for inspiration, putting together a reading list, encouraging learners to engage in independent study, rewriting a course or simply looking for inspiration, these factors will influence your choice. You will also be thinking about the type of learners you have, their context and desired learning outcomes.

In addition to sites such as YouTube, that offer both openly licensed and non-openly licensed materials, some websites offer openly available materials that are not openly licensed. For example, the BBC-hosted website BBC Learning has lots of useful resources, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from providers such as FutureLearn or MITx provide whole courses that might be useful and which anyone can sign up to. As resources from these sites are not necessarily openly licensed, you will need to check before reusing them.

When you are choosing an open resource, quality might initially be a concern. MOOC platforms and curated content sites are often part of an organisation’s public engagement strategy, and institutions ensure that their courses are developed in accordance with defined quality criteria. Examples include The Open University’s OpenLearn, The University of Edinburgh’s OpenEd and The University of Nottingham’s U Now. These can be good places to start looking for open content. To help other users and provide feedback to the resource’s creator, some platforms enable you to ‘rate’ a resource or comment on it.

Figure 3.6 ‘OpenEd’ (University of Edinburgh, http://open.ed.ac.uk/, CC BY 4.0 International)

Figure 3.7 ‘OpenLearn’ (OEPS, CC-BY-NC-SA)

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This picture shows a screenshot of part of the OpenLearn website (www.open.edu/openlearn). In the left hand corner is the word ‘OpenLearn’. 'The word ‘Open’ is written in dark blue and the word 'Learn' is written in grey. The two words are run together to form one word. To the right of this is the phrase ‘The home of free learning from the Open University since 2006’. Underneath all of this are some blue buttons. From left to right across the picture these are ‘Health, Sports and Psychology’, ‘Education’, ‘History and the Arts’, ‘Languages’, ‘Money and Management’. This is the start of one further button but the only writing that is visible is ‘N ... E’.

Figure 3.7 ‘OpenLearn’ (OEPS, CC-BY-NC-SA)

Yet what does ‘quality’ mean to you when you’re planning to adapt something to your own context? As David Wiley argues in his post ‘Stop saying “high quality”’, references to quality when discussing OER often ignore the critical point that:

In other words, your choice of a resource will take into account the needs of the learners and relevance to the objectives of the activity, course or learning journey.

3.4 Attributing a resource

In Section 3.2 you searched for openly licensed materials that you might want to incorporate or use in your everyday practice. You also identified the resource’s licence and what this means for how you can reuse the resource. The next stage is to look at how to attribute the resource when you are reusing it within your own context. This is good practice for two reasons: not only to ensure that you have appropriately accredited the authorship and licence of the original material, but also so that people using or reviewing the resource you have created are able to reuse the material in their own context.

A quick and easy way to remember what information you need to include when reusing resources is by remembering an acronym: TASL. This stands for Title, Author, Source, Licence. TASL tells you what you need to include to ensure that you are appropriately acknowledging the source of the OER that you are using.

Figure 3.8 ‘Pink rose birthday cake’ (Rexness, CC BY-SA 2.0), screenshot created by Beck Pitt

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This picture shows a white two-tier cake placed on a table covered by a white tablecloth. There are dark- and light-pink sugar flowers around the bottom of the cake and between the top and bottom tiers. There are two pink flowers placed on the top of the cake, along with some other bits of pink icing, however it is unclear in the picture what these are.

Figure 3.8 ‘Pink rose birthday cake’ (Rexness, CC BY-SA 2.0), screenshot created by Beck Pitt

Let’s illustrate this with an example. If you follow this link to Flickr you can find the above picture of a cake, which was found using a Google search and filtering images for ‘labeled for reuse’ (see Section 3.2 for more on how to do this), and has been uploaded to Flickr by its creator. How will we correctly license this resource using TASL?

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Figure 3.9 ‘Flickr resource information’ (Rexness, CC BY-SA 2.0), screenshot created by Beck Pitt

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This is a screenshot from the Flickr website. It shows the part of the page with the information about the image.

At the top of the screenshot the bottom of the picture of the cake from the previous screenshot can just be seen. What’s visible is the white tablecloth, the cake board and part of the bottom tier of dark- and light-pink sugar flowers.

Underneath this on the left-hand side is a picture of a man drinking from a cup, to the right of this is the word ‘Rexness’ and to the right of that is a button which states ‘Follow’. Below ‘Rexness’ is the phrase ‘Pink rose birthday cake’ and below that is the phrase ‘Made for a 40th birthday party’.

There is a gap and then a star with the phrase ‘Helen Thorn, Ann Ternova and 3 more people faved this’.

Below this is an empty box containing the phrase ‘Add a comment’.

On the right of the screenshot, below the picture, is a line which states ‘10,571 views’, ‘5 faves’, ‘0 comments’, and ‘Taken on July 10, 2011’.

Below ‘Taken on July 10, 2011’ is the CC BY-SA logo (the CC BY-SA symbol comprising a circle with a stick figure of a person in the middle of the circle; and to the right of this symbol a circle with a circular arrow in the middle pointing anticlockwise); to the right of this is the phrase ‘Some rights reserved’.

Below this is a circle with the letter ‘i’ in it and the phrase ‘Show EXIF’; to the right of this is a map of Oceania. Below this is the phrase ‘This photo is in 1 album’.

‘Rexness’ is circled in red with a red arrow pointing towards it and the phrase ‘Author’ written beside it.

‘Pink rose birthday cake’ is circled in red with a red arrow pointing towards it and the phrase ‘Title’ written beside it.

The CC BY SA logo and phrase ‘Some rights reserved’ is circled in red with a red arrow pointing towards it and the phrase ‘License information’ written beside it.

Figure 3.9 ‘Flickr resource information’ (Rexness, CC BY-SA 2.0), screenshot created by Beck Pitt

First, what is the resource’s title? In this instance it is labeled as ‘Pink rose birthday cake.’ So that others can see the origin of the resource we also need to provide the URL (https://www.flickr.com/ photos/ rexness/ 5920122416/ in/ gallery-123856341) of the page on Flickr where the image is hosted.

Who created the resource? The author or creator of the cake photo is Rexness. We can view Rexness’s Flickr profile by clicking on his name and clicking on the dropdown menu labeled ‘More’ on the right-hand side of the page and choosing ‘Profile’. This reveals further information about Rexness and we will use this URL as part of our attribution.

What is the source of the resource? In this instance the source of the image is the same as the URL we are using for the resource’s title.

What licence does the image have? To see an image’s licence information on Flickr, click on the ‘Some rights reserved’ text below the date the image was created. This reveals that the image ‘Pink rose birthday cake’ has been licensed CC BY-SA 2.0 by Rexness. We are also redirected to Creative Commons licence information automatically. This is the URL we need to include so that others can find out the correct licence information.

So what does the final attribution look like?

‘Pink rose birthday cake’ by Rexness is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

For further advice on attribution, consult the Creative Commons Wiki guidelines on best practice for attribution and Glasgow Caledonian University's guide to Reusing Content for more advice and examples.

When you decide to use an open resource that someone has provided, it is also good practice, where possible, to let the creator of the resource know how you have reused it (for example via the comments section on the relevant webpage etc.). In instances where the author has listed the licence but not explicitly linked to the relevant licence deed, you should provide an explicit link to the licence when reusing.

One issue for creators of OER is how to measure the impact of the resources they openly license: once ‘in the wild’ or freely available, it is extremely difficult to track how and in what contexts they are reused. You can read more about tracking the impact of resources in Section 4.6.

3.5 Curating OER

The notion of the teacher or facilitator as curator is helpful when working with open and online resources (Siemens, 2007) and reflects the possibility of education moving away from the ‘transmission’ of knowledge from teacher to learner, to a more constructivist approach which acknowledges the value of education created by the learner. Earlier in this section of the course we focused on one aspect of the curation process: choosing OER and what factors are important to you when selecting resources.

When using OER it is important to consider how you will integrate material into the learning process, particularly if you are blending together material that has been used in different situations (e.g. online or face-to-face). You will need a clear structure with guidance on outcomes, sequencing and, (where appropriate), you might want to consider including opportunities to collaborate with fellow learners. For example, providing your learners with a set of URLs to useful resources, however relevant and interesting, will not necessarily give sufficient context or information on why the learner should read further. You might want to consider introducing peer support (again, where appropriate), and study groups might be one option for bringing people together to discuss course materials.

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Figure 3.10 ‘Content curation’ (Welenia Studios, CC-BY 2.0), based on an article by Rohit Bhargava, http://www.rohitbhargava.com/ 2011/ 03/ the-5-models-of-content-curation.html

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This picture shows five picture frames behind a red rope barrier (as if in a museum). Above the pictures is the title ‘Content curation’; beside this is ‘© Welena. 2011’. Underneath this is written ‘Rohit Bhargava:- The act of finding, grouping, organizing or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue.’ Underneath this are the picture frames.

From left to right the picture frame are as follows:

Rectangular picture frame with lots of circles, triangles and oblongs in it. The title under the frame is ‘Aggregation’. Underneath this is written ‘Pulling the most relevant information about a particular topic into a single location.’

Rectangular picture frame with a picture of a distillation tube in it. The title under the frame is ‘Distillation’. Underneath this is written ‘More simplistic format – only the most important/relevant ideas are shared.’

Rectangular picture frame with a picture of the word ‘info’ in it, the word is encased in two boxes and above the boxes are two same-sized arrows, one arrow pointing down towards the word and the other arrow pointing up away from it. The title under the frame is ‘Elevation’. Underneath this is written ‘Identify a larger trend/insight from smaller, regular musings.’

There is an oval frame with a treble clef in it. The title under the frame is ‘Mashup’. Underneath this is written ‘Juxtapositions = merging existing content to create new points of view.’

Square frame with an analogue alarm clock in it. The title under the frame is ‘Chronology’. Underneath is written ‘Organize historical information by time to show how understanding has evolved.’

Figure 3.10 ‘Content curation’ (Welenia Studios, CC-BY 2.0), based on an article by Rohit Bhargava, http://www.rohitbhargava.com/ 2011/ 0...

Even if your learners are confident and have advanced digital literacy skills, without the OER being integrated into a broader framework or by providing support to navigate materials, it might be difficult to follow and engage with the content as a whole. Ensuring that any open resources you choose to utilise are smoothly mixed together is an important element of good open educational practice. In addition, you might want to encourage students to create OER as part of their studies (see Section 2.5) or work with students to rewrite course material or textbooks. As Natalie Lafferty of Dundee University noted in an interview published in February 2016, if you plan to incorporate learning activities that involve students in creating digital assets, it’s important to ensure that there is appropriate advice, information and support to get started. The next section of the course will take a closer look at curation as ‘remix.’

Now try the Section 3 quiz to consolidate your knowledge and understanding from this section. Completing the quizzes is part of gaining the statement of participation and/or the digital badge, as explained in the Course and badge information.

3.6 If you want to know more ...

Each If you want to know more … section of the course thematically presents additional material and resources on the topics for that section of the course.