Learn About Open Education

Open Education

Utah Tech University has dedicated itself to pursuing an open education mission. Open education seeks to widen access and participation to everyone by removing barriers and making learning accessible for all.

Utah Tech has officially adopted the OpenEdu Framework created by the European Commission, which encompasses core dimensions of open education including content/OER, pedagogy/OEP, recognition, collaboration, research, and access. At the Utah Tech Library we have focused our efforts on OER and portions of OEP.

OER

Most educators are introduced to Open Educational Resources (OER) by trying to eliminate or reduce materials costs for students. An admirable pursuit, but OER also provides advantages to faculty in its ability to be edited, shared, and improved upon. Instead of giving away intellectual property to private publishers, universities and individual faculty have themselves become the publishing houses by producing and sharing material under open licenses for the common good.

Some Basics

OER are educational materials in any form that are either in the public domain or have an open license that allows users to reuse, retain, revise, remix, and redistribute. Though not everything that you find on the web for free is considered an OER, they might still be valuable to your courses. This other set of materials that we are calling Affordable Educational Resources (AER) which are free to access copyrighted resources or materials that are licensed through the library.

Both are valuable and allow faculty to have a wider choice of materials.

OEP

Open Educational Practices (OEP) is another component of open education. Using a cooking analogy*, experts have called OER the ingredients whereas OEP is the recipe. It is the practice of sharing how, what, and why you're teaching with other Utah Tech faculty and beyond.

You can share in a variety of ways from how you're using an OER textbook in your class, an entire course structure, a new assessment strategy you tried out and want to tell others about it, etc.

UT Library has created OEP templates in MERLOT's content builder so you can share your practices easily.

(*analogy credited to Gerry Hanley, MERLOT Executive Director)

OER basics - training presentation & slides

OER Basic Video:

OER Basics Slides

Copyright & Creative Commons presentation

Know Your Rights: Copyright & Creative Commons for Faculty Video:

CTL training

Link to come.

Open ed week

ADD Free and Open Educational Resources You're Using or Created into MERLOT

Are you using OER in your teaching or your learning? Have you created free and open teaching materials? We invite you to catalog these resources in MERLOT. Your colleagues and students around the world will thank you!

IT IS EASY!

First: Become a member of MERLOT (It will take about 2 minutes and it is FREE).

Second: Fill out the online form to contribute a Material. (It will take about 4 minutes the first time. MERLOT provides systematic instructions on our YouTube Channel and a handout (PDF).