Open Educational Resources (OER)

What is it?

If you’re a K-12 teacher, you’ve probably relied on Open Educational Resources (OER) whether you know it or not. Maybe you’ve even created some. “Open educational resources (OER) are openly-licensed, freely available educational materials that can be modified and redistributed by users,” explains Abbey Elder and Stacy Katz in the OER Starter Kit Workbook. This publication is an OER: you are free to share any component of it, adapt it for your use, and redistribute it as you see fit. The only thing you can’t do with an OER is pretend you created it all on your own in the first place. That’s why most OER at the very least carry the CC-BY license: a Creative Commons license that requires giving credit to the creator(s) of the resource.

An OER can be small, like a single image or video, or big, like an entire textbook or course. OER can even be huge, like the full K-12 ELA, math, and social-emotional curriculums available at OpenUp Resources or Kendall Hunt's K-5 Illustrative Mathematics curriculum and family resources (available in Spanish too). Let’s consider some examples in greater detail.

	Whole courses or individual activities or videos at Algebra2Go	Any video from the popular Crash Course YouTube series	This Photograph of Frederick Douglass
Openly licensed?
	Yes! The CC-BY license is on display at the bottom of the site. All I’d need to do to use it is give credit to the site.	Kind of. Crash Course’s FAQ page says teachers may use videos as long as they are attributed. But there's no license to remix and reshare.	Yes! The "OA Public Domain" caption indicates that this is part of the Metropolitan Museum's Open Access collection and that is in the public domain.
Free?
	Yes! The welcome text confirms that everything on the site is offered to students and teachers for free.	Yes! While the videos encourage financial support via Patreon, no fees are required to view them.	Yes! Just click the download button for a really high-resolution copy.
Remixable?
	Yes! The CC-BY license does not include an ND, no-derivatives, indicator. I can even redistribute my remix commercially, as there is no NC (no commercial use) indicator.	No. No such permissions are granted explicitly. Teachers would need to seek special permission from Crash Course.	Yes. The public domain status (as well as the OA pop-up text) confirms it can be modified and reshared, even for commercial purposes.

Why do K-12 educators care?

At their best, OER can improve accessibility:

Because they are free, OER can save students, families, teachers, schools, and districts money that can be reallocated elsewhere.
Perhaps more importantly, because they can be remixed, OER allow teachers to customize the resources for their curriculum and their students. Remixing might include adapting the source for a range of reading levels or including supports like word banks or images to make content more accessible. Remixing might also include enhancing a resource to better reflect the religious, racial, gender, economic, linguistic, or neurological diversity of a classroom’s students or local community.
Because they can be remixed and reshared, OER also can invite a more open pedagogy. Not only can teachers alter OER to better serve their students, but students can take ownership over OER, creating or customizing them for other sections of the class, for other audiences, like parents or younger students, or for the next year’s group of students.

What can it look like in the classroom?

Open Lesson Plans for a 3D Printing Unit
Shared on #GoOpenVA, this four-day open lesson on 3D printing comes complete with identified competencies, targets, essential questions, and materials, as well as student documents and sample reflection slides. Because the author, Bridget Mariano, has shared with a CC-BY license (one of the most open Creative Commons licenses, requiring only attribution), teachers can adapt this lesson in to suit learners needs (such as altering vocabulary to suit younger kids), to increase interdisciplinary connections (such as reconstructing a historic space or designing to respond to environmental or geographic factors), or to be culturally responsive to their particular students (working within budgets or in apartment spaces rather than the more consumerist “dream space”).

Open SEL-Music Lesson Plan for K-2

Shared on Washington State's OER Commons site, this four-part lesson has K-2 students moving and singing to analyze emotions. The CC-BY license means that the lesson is free to access, remix, and reshare. For example, teachers in culturally diverse classrooms may choose to explore nuances of emotions and emotional expression across cultures.

From My Classroom to Yours: An Open Syllabus Created with Middle-School Students
One of my own favorite projects with students was creating an open AAPI history syllabus with them to address the gap we saw in our seventh-grade American History curriculum, which contained little trace of Asian-American History. The project displays the CC-BY-NC license and includes an open invitation in the Welcome section for teachers and students to re-use and remix the flawed collection of sources my students and I found and evaluated for middle-school use. (I happily share my entire, fully open lesson plans with you, from evaluation handouts to a presentation on OER to students.)

What should I be careful about?

Quality
Effective teachers always ask critical questions when choosing quality classroom materials, such as whether a resource is age-appropriate or what important perspectives are missing. But, with OER, teachers can also ask an additional question: can my students, colleagues, or I make this resource more effective for ourselves and others? Because OER invite remixing, teachers can make the changes they need, altering language, providing local content, or inserting the missing perspectives, and then reshare that improved resource for others to use. Teachers can also invite their students to do this work as well. For example, the American Yawp is a tremendous OER: an open US History textbook (with a slew of ancillary teaching materials) updated annually to respond to criticism, new discoveries, and recent events. But, a teacher looking for Asian-American histories won’t find much, and teachers looking to provide a chapter in Spanish or Mandarin won’t find that either. Inviting students to intervene, by collectively writing a missing chapter or by translating a chapter, can be hugely effective, as students learn about the content while providing a product to be used in future years or other classrooms and are invited to do real work.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion
Using OER well requires particular sensitivity to diversity, equity, and inclusion. For just one example, think about how public domain may affect the degree to which OER are representative of your classroom or community’s diversity. As of 2021, all works created prior to 1926 are in the public domain, available to use, remix, and reshare. That’s a lot of great material, from books like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk to Jelly Roll Morton’s song “King Porter Stomp” and Buster Keaton’s movie “Go West.” But, at nearly a century old, these materials are often written with complex syntax and vocabulary and can contain complicated social representations or terms that require historical context. And, they reflect the social restrictions of the time that marginalized voices of color and nondominant gender even more than today. In other words, the most accessible public domain texts will be those published by a largely white and male publishing and entertainment industry.

Licensing
If a resource is in the public domain or labelled with a Creative Commons license that does not include the ND (no derivatives) designation, you’re set to use it for your classroom and to remix and reshare as you see fit. For those of you who share your work for profit, such as on teacherspayteachers.org, avoid Creative Commons licenses that also include NC (non-commercial).

How can I try it?

Got 5 minutes?

Browse (or have your students browse) one of these collections for a resource that might suit your class needs:

The Smithsonian: You’re bound to get great ideas for using, remixing, and resharing in this collection of nearly 3 million open-access images from the 19 institutions under the Smithsonian umbrella.
Project Gutenberg: This site, boasting 60,000 open books (including public domain children's books), has led the charge of opening access since the 1970s.

Got a whole class period?

Create an open lesson for a popular topic or text that only takes one class period to deliver. Maybe a poetry-writing exercise to go with Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X or a set of practice word problems featuring diverse names and settings for an upcoming math unit on fractions. Test it with your students, let them critique it, and then send it out in the world either through your own networks or repositories like the OER Commons. They’ll learn the content while doing something meaningful for the world! Don't forget to add a Creative Commons license, such as CC-BY (where you ask users of your work to cite you as the source) or a CC-BY-NC (which adds to a CC-BY that your work cannot be used for commercial purposes).

Got a whole unit or course?

Try my favorite approach: involve your students. Ask them to build an open resource with you for a particular unit. For example, ask students individually or in groups to create practice, quiz, or test questions and then use them for the final assessment of the unit. Students can create “how to solve” answer keys too. For extra challenge or for older students, give bonus points for pointing out common misconceptions or creating “distractors”—those almost-right answers that tricked many of us during old-fashioned multiple choice tests. Your new question sets will often reflect wider cultural perspectives and values than any single author could provide. Share your favorite sets with the world either through your own networks or repositories like the OER Commons. Remember to protect your students’ identities when you share work they’ve helped create. Consider having students create course-relevant pen names or referring to them by first name only.

Where can I learn more?

In just under 8 minutes, you can read a higher-ed explanation of the social justice and pedagogical benefits of OER at the Textbooks, OER, and the Need for Open Pedagogy chapter of Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel's book An Urgency of Teachers.

Do you prefer blog posts to academic papers? Try Edutopia’s page “Open Educational Resources (OER): Resource Roundup,” which provides a little history of the OER movement and some links to great tools to explore. (And note the effect of public domain photos in the opening video—mostly white men! Maybe we should remix that one. The video farther down the page is far more diverse.)

Looking for a greater handle on OER? Try the OER Starter Kit Workbook, complete with access to Google worksheets to test out what you learn.

Jennifer Van Allen and Stacy Katz address how OER can increase access and improve learning for students PK - college in “Teaching with OER During Pandemics and Beyond.”

In OER Awareness and Use: The Affinity Between Higher Education and K-12, Constance Blomgren shares her experience in promoting OER use in K12 environments, tracing a path available to Canadian educators that is now similarly available to K12 American public school teachers through the US Department of Education’s #GoOpen initiative.

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