OER Trends

An examination of how Open Educational Resources

are changing the landscape of education in
Corporate and Academic settings

INTE 6750
eLearning Trends &
Issues- Fall 2014

Patti Bryant,
Courtney Dale,
Haley Harbaugh,
and Kelly Hicks

0|Page

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History of OER
Within a group of four individuals, we examined how OER is changing the landscape of education.
We focused on two areas of OER Corporate and Academic to narrow down our scope and
research.

Backstory of Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources (OER) are defined by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation
and Development (2007) as accumulated digital assets which can be adjusted and provide
benefits without restricting the possibilities for others to enjoy them (p. 29). Another
definition of OER came from Hewlett Foundation (2007), OER are teaching, learning, and
research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual
property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational
resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests,
software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge
(p. 4). OER came into existence from a 2002 UNESCO forum titled Impact of Open Courseware
for Higher Education in Developing Countries where participants from various educational
institutions agreed, their wish to develop together a universal educational resource for the
whole of humanity, to be referred to henceforth as Open Educational Resources (Daniel &
Uvali-Trumbi, 2012, p. 5), and ever since has gained momentum in the educational realm.
An article by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development considers the
question Why should anyone give anything away? What are the possible gains in doing so?
and explores OER advantages and disadvantages (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development [OECD] 2007). Some of the advantages mentioned include the reduction of
duplicate work, allowing others to improve upon shared content, positive boost in public
relations, the speeding up of development of new learning resources, and increased innovation.
This bridges the gap of knowledge across the world and connects people to others in a
supportive, knowledge-enhancing way. Some of the barriers mentioned include difficulties
covering costs of developing and sustaining an OER project in the long run. A social barrier is
the unwillingness to share or use resources produced by someone else. Finally, a legal barrier is
the prohibition to use copyrighted materials without consent.

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Corporate
OER use in corporate settings is a more recent expansion for this educational tool. Advocates
for corporate OER use, such as Belshaw and McGill (2013), provided some of the benefits listed
in Figure 1.
Access to repurposable content

New potential partnerships with content providers and other sectors

Input to scoping, development and endorsement of OER in their focus area

Understanding of customer needs (for example, commercial publishers finding out
what kinds of OER and learning resources are wanted by teachers and/or learners)
Upskilling - increased understanding of IPR, curriculum development and learning
technologies

Figure 1

Corporate training can take many faces pre-employment, new-hire, ongoing, or skills training
just to name a few. In 2007, a website named ALISON (2014) was designed by Michael Feerick
to help you develop essential, certified workplace skills. In addition to developing workplace
skills prior to employment, employers also use OER to develop their current employees.
Udacity, OpenLearn, and Udemy are just a few other OER sources that cater to corporate
learning.

Academic
OER use in K-12 settings has been embraced through the use of Google, Educause, and many
other resources that allow free access for students to utilize. At MastersDegreeOnline.Net
(2013) they list various OER outlets that are available to the average learner whether in K-12
or pursuing higher education which helped to organize many of the OER in one location.
According to Wikipedia (2014), One of the first OER resources for K-20 education is Curriki. A
nonprofit organization, Curriki provides an Internet site for open source curriculum (OSC)

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development, to provide universal access to free curricula and instructional materials for
students up to the age of 18 (K-12). Inaugural resources such as this one opened the door for a
multitude of other companies to offer their content on a free sharing forum.

Trends
An article by Jacobs (2014), related to academic use of OER, claimed in the near future, 80
percent of textbooks would be replaced by OER content. If this claim comes to fruition, there
will be a huge evolution that sweeps the educational community. In fact, Carey (2014) states
there is already innovation on this front, Now a startup called Boundless.com is trying to
change that [traditional textbooks] with a service it calls textbook replacement. Over the last
decade, a great deal of academic content has been made available on the Internet, for free.
Carey goes on to mention in the article that the small group of major publishers that controls
the lions share of the $7 billion textbook market is now trying sue Boundless out of existence.
In addition to Boundless.com, Pearson The education and media company today will unveil
Project Blue Sky, a search engine to help instructors locate free materials from popular OER
repositories (Kolowich, 2012).
As both academic and corporate OER material enters the market, there will be significant
changes to the face of education. For the remainder of the paper, academic and corporate OER
is discussed as it currently stands, with some insights to how cost plays an important role with
integration and adoption. The paper begins with the corporate setting, and how companies are
weaving their training content into an OER format. The second section relates to academic use,
which highlights the unique structure schools are taking related to Creative Commons and
educational barriers by using OER.

Corporate OER
All organizations are made up of people. No matter the organization, people need a basic set of
skills in addition to the skills required by their specific role. These skills include things like time
management, project management, communication skills, and common software applications.
If youre a leader, no matter your industry, there is a separate set of basic skills needed
including how to have honest conversations, administering performance reviews, dealing with
conflict management, etc. These skills form a basic requirement in many workplaces, and are
subject to broadly-accepted best practices (Zavosh, 2014).

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Using OER removes the cost and burden that occur when every training organization creates
training on standard topics. For example, more than 1.1 billion people use the Microsoft Office
suite (Microsoft by the Numbers, 2014). Now, imagine the time and cost it takes for every
training organization for each of those companies to create training on the Microsoft Office
suite. OER provides a free base curriculum for every organization, which allows Training
Departments to focus on creating advanced training for their specific company needs.
An additional benefit of OER is the fact that it is easier to keep base content up-to-date. For
example, if a company utilized the training available on Microsofts website to train their
employees, theyll always receive the most up-to-date training. This is because when Microsoft
releases an update, they also update their training. If the Training Department for each
company had created their own Microsoft Office suite training, course maintenance would
need to be implemented every time a major user interface update occurred, which takes
resources that could be used in much more effective ways away from the department and
increases the cost of that department to the organization.
Another benefit, in this scenario, is the fact that Microsoft is the expert in their product and,
therefore, ensures that the content is accurate and high quality. Utilizing the expert of a
particular topic saves a corporation time and money. A typical Training Developer may not be
an expert on Microsoft Office. Therefore, they can leverage the expert to assist them in
providing high quality, accurate content to their corporation.
Another scenario in which OER could be helpful is an entry-level employee who needs to learn
about statistics for their role in the Finance Department. The company has many options to
help this employee succeed including partnering them with a more senior-level employee,
sending them to a class, or providing them with access to a free Intro to Statistics course on an
OER site like Udacity. In this course, the employee can learn about scatter plots, bar and pie
charts, correlations vs. causation, averages, variance, outliers, and more. The Intro to Statistics
course even includes problems-solving opportunity, knowledge checks to test their retention,
and a final exam.
One potential issue that corporations implementing OER materials must consider is the quality
of the content. There are many content resources and finding credible, quality content is
extremely important to ensure the benefits of OER remain high. This could potentially take time
and careful searching up front, which costs the company time. However, once quality content is
identified, time that would have been invested in the research, analysis, creation, and
maintenance of content are all saved, which saves the company money in time and resources.
For example, the instructor of the Intro to Statistics course on Udacity is Sebastian Thrun. He

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has many credentials that make him qualified to teach the Intro to Statistics class, and
therefore, the quality is high.

Figure 2 (Udacity)

In addition to Udacity, there are many OER materials for individuals and corporations including
Coursera, (https://www.coursera.org/), Udemy (http://www.udemy.com/), and OpenLearn
(http://www.open.edu/openlearn/). While there are many resources for corporations,
corporations themselves should also consider becoming a resource. Each OER has a creator and
while it can be incredibly helpful to utilize resources, just like in any aspect of life, giving should
be considered.
While using OER in corporate settings yields many benefits, there are also a range of benefits
and ways OER can be incorporated into the academia world.

OER in Academia
The OER movement is making significant changes in learning and teaching because it allows for
more efficient ways for teachers to get classroom materials (The Office of Superintendent of
Public Instruction, 2013, p.1). Now a teacher might decide to download and print a textbook,
make modifications to that textbook, include video and audio into that textbook, and not only
build but share their lesson plans as they are created. Because OERs are free, can be updated
and modified, and exist in a digital format they allow for a whole new way of instruction (The
Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, 2013).
However is the use of OER really making a difference in learning? According to a recent study
led by PhD student Jared Robinson at BYU and Lumen Learning, students that used OER
material compared with students that did not use OER material had a statistically significant
difference in three science subjects, particularly chemistry (Horowitz, 2014). According to
Horowitzs article the OER material came from a group of 18 teachers who created their own
textbooks using the CK-12 Foundation.

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CK-12 Foundation, a nonprofit organization, is just one of the many organizations that exist to
provide teachers and educators with free, open access to textbooks and textbook creation.
According to the Executive Director, Neeru Khosla, the vision of the organization is based on a
new model [that] adapts to each students level, style, and circumstance while leveraging new
digital tools to answer the most fundamental questions: What can digitization do for the
textbook? and What can digitization do for learning? instead of the more mundane How
can the textbook become digital? (CK-12, 2014).
Other organizations that have led the initiative for pushing OER into the classroom include The
Hewlett Foundation, although primarily focusing on higher education. Their goals are to use
information technology to help equalize access to knowledge and educational opportunities
across the world (Hewlett Foundation, 2007). According to the Hewlett Foundation report
(2007) they invested about $68 million from 2002 through 2007 to organizations like MIT, Utah
State, and the Rice Connexicons Project.
The Hewlett Foundations grants are helping higher education institutions develop programs,
software, and platforms that do everything from publishing OER material, providing assistance
to those who want to publish, and serving as a clearinghouse inventory of resources (Hewlett
Foundation, 2007). In fact, when educational leaders like MIT decided to participate and
provide free access to primary materials for all their courses, they helped push the movement
into accepting that high-quality content can be made available and accessible for free; a major
concern for the use of OER materials. This is important because it not only increases the
confidence in the use of the material but the sustainability of the movement, others would
even argue such initiatives help decrease social inequality and the digital divide. According to
Olcott (2012), OER may ultimately be the genuine equalizer for education and for empowering
social inclusion in a pluralistic, multicultural, and imperfect world.
An important element of OER is the permission to use the materials in new ways. Until recently
much of the learning materials were locked up behind passwords within proprietary systems,
unreachable for outsiders (OECOD, 2007). Creative Commons licensing is the leader for
creating licenses that allow for flexible negotiations of legal rights in digital content (OECOD,
2007). The licenses start with baseline features which include statements like: licenses are
granted the right to copy, distribute, display, digitally perform, and make verbatim copies of the
work into the same or another format; attribution must be given to the creator of the copyright
work, and more (OECOD, 2007). Licenses also have optional features that can protect the
material from being used for commercial use, restrict derivative work, or both. The licenses
work by allowing for licensees to decide how they wish their work to be used, reused, or even
distributed. According to OECOD (2007), the idea is to ask willing copyright owners to license

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out or distribute their material on the basis of protocols designed to enhance reusability and
build the information commons (p.76). And so far based on the number of participants it is
working.
Since textbooks are considered the basic classroom educational resource (Belliston, 2009)
they also form much of the discussion of the activities concerning OER. It should be noted that
the difference between a digital textbook or e-book and OER books is that a digital textbook
allows users to modify its contents. Textbook creation has become a popular concept and
emerging trend the classroom. Proponents have argued that textbook creation is a necessity
given the rising cost of textbooks, the extended publishing timeframe that makes some books
obsolete as soon as printed, and their limited relevance from some courses (Adamich, 2011;
Hilton, Robinson, Wiley & Ackerman, 2014; Shelstad, 2011). Even printing textbooks on demand
provides a viable solution for both the publisher and the professor that can get the books
exactly as needed.
Rice University's Richard Baraniuk one of the most public supporters for textbook creation. In
his TEDTalk, Baraniuk describes replacing textbooks with free open-source online educational
resources that facilitate curriculum creation and professional collaboration among teachers
worldwide (Baraniuk, 2006). He describes how Connexions, a Web site that uses Creative
Commons licensing can enable teachers to quickly "rip, mix, and burn" coursework without fear
of copyright violation that would encompassing hundreds of online courses (Baraniuk, 2006).
He believes that as we move into the 21st century we need more options for how we learn,
teach, and access knowledge; and with OER we are now able to make that change.
A great example of this change starts at The Amarillo Area Center for Advanced Learning, in
Texas, where they are now replacing textbooks with digital open educational resources (OER)
for their math and science classes. The district is pairing iPads with a free, web-based solution,
Net Texts, for access to OER from Curriki, Khan Academy, and several universities (T H E Journal
[Technological Horizons in Education], 2013). OER activities can be said to be creating a new
culture of contribution (Belliston, 2009). One can especially see this change in the music
industry as music is constantly altered and tampered with from its original version, creating
almost entirely new sounding music.
However, according to Hilton, Wiley, and Lutz (2012) research has shown that the revision and
remix rates for OER materials are relatively low, even with sources like the openly licensed
textbooks from Flat World Knowledge, AcademicPub, Connexicons, CK-12, and more. Their
research showed that most customization with Flat World Knowledge textbooks consisted of
deletions at 60%, followed by reordering at 40%, additions at 16% and remixes at only 1.62%,

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Customization of OER
0%

20%

40%

60%

Remixes
Additions
Reordering
Deletions
Figure 3

Percent

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see Figure 3. They believe deletion

and reorder consist of the most
common type of customization
because it is the easiest type of
customization, requiring little
work. Hence, this study shows that
while the use of OER is fairly easy
to implement, the application of
OER with remixes or revisions is
evolving much slower than
originally suspected.

OER has quickly evolved since its emergence in 2002. The use of open licenses like Creative
Commons has also significantly helped the movement. Even with increased access to the
internet and the supported concept of open the next wave of OER still needs to see more use,
especially in terms of remixing and modification to understand its true potential.

Conclusion
Why does OER matter? As education and training changes, OER creates a dynamic interplay
between the user and creator of those materials. This interplay allows OER to expand the
educational market to smaller companies and individuals with limited funds, which often makes
education more difficult to obtain. Another benefit of OER is the flexibility it provides. OER
content can be incorporated into existing content and does not need to standalone. For
example, an IT curriculum may need to incorporate a topic on mobile app development.
Stanford University provides this course on their website and it can be accessed by anyone so it
could easily be used to supplement existing resources.
In Figure 4 below, OER is culminated into four different aspects Reuse, Redistribute, Revise,
and Remix. Real-life examples of the beneficial outcomes from OER are also provided to show
how OER is already benefiting education and training.

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Example- This course can be

accessed for free on the Stanford
University website.

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Remix
Example- An IT training company
could take slides from the material
of the course from Stanford
University and audio from an
existing resource to create a new
derivative work.

Example- An IT company could take

the material from this course and use
it to supplement their own course to
provide a more comprehensive
learning tool for their employees.

Reuse
-Allowing the
use of all or part
of the work for
your own
purpose

-Combining two
or more existing
resources to
create a new
resource

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Redistribute
-Sharing work
with others

Revise
-Adapt, modify,
translate, or
changing the
work

Example- An entrepreneur can

make this course more suitable
for entry level students with
detailed examples, language
translation, development tools
and starting a training class to
teach hands on course on
Mobile app development
(Progia LearnWare, 2014).

Figure 4 OER Examples in Corporate and Academic (Hilton, Wiley, Stein and Johnson, 2010)

In the coming years, OER is expected to become a widely used tool in education and training.
The examples provided above display how OER is currently being used, but the possibilities for
this tool are becoming more apparent every day. With corporate training focused less on face
to face interactions, and academic endeavors leaning heavily on Creative Commons use, OER is
a viable education companion for the future.

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