Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Licensing
The National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (NFT&L) Open Licensing Toolkit outlines the NFT&L’s commitment to creating and sharing open licensed materials and open educational resources (OER). The toolkit provides a detailed description of Creative Commons (CC) licenses, the global standard for open licensing, as well as a 4-step guide to choosing, creating and adding CC licenses to resources in order to make them OER, i.e. able to be shared, reused and adapted in different institutional, disciplinary and program contexts.
The NFT&L webinar and toolkit offers some great ways to start thinking about and applying OER into your daily work in higher ed. I have been a big fan of The 5 R’s for OER (from The Power of Open Educational Resources by @opencontent) for a while as I always appreciate an open educational remix. The 5 R’s offer ways to have control of rights, accessing others work, and updating works for your own projects and work (if permitted, and licensed):
- Retain: make and own a copy
- Reuse: use in a wide range of ways
- Revise: adapt, modify, and improve
- Remix: combine two or more
- Redistribute: share with others
Professionals using OER are not just limited to higher education (e.g. libraries, faculty, students, researchers or administrators), but a number of businesses, NGOs, publishers, museums, government, galleries, and more are finding open licensing helpful in their occupational domains.
Reference:
National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. (2019, May 15). The National Forum Open Licensing Toolkit in teachingandlearning.ie Retrieved from https://www.teachingandlearning.ie/publication/the-national-forum-open-licensing-toolkit/.