Open Education (OE): A Fact Sheet for Faculty: Home

What is Open Education?

Open Education encompasses educational resources, tools and practices that can be freely and fully used in the digital environment without legal, financial, or technical barriers. In higher education Open Education can be described by three main pillars:

• Open Educational Resources (OER) - the foundation upon on which OE is built
• Open Educational Practices (OEP) - teaching techniques that leverage the “open” nature of OER and open technologies to facilitate learning
• Open Educational Policy - refers to policy frameworks that support, encourage, and remove barriers to Open Education

(SPARC, 2018 Open Education Primer)

What is the difference between free and open?

"Free" means that materials are free to access, but not remix or revise. The meaning of “open” is typically defined in terms of users being able to freely exercise the five “R” rights: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. 

The 5Rs

• Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
• Reuse – the right to reuse the content as verbatim or in its unaltered form
• Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
• Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create
  something new
• Redistribute – the right to make and share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others  (Wiley,  2014 https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221)

What are OER?

“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 and 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.” (Hewlett Foundation, 2019 https://hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational-resources/ )

What is the value of OE and why consider it?

The decision to adopt Open Educational Practices and OER in the classroom are rooted in the desire to support students. The “why” goes beyond removing the cost barriers to a quality education for students. There are a number of reasons why faculty should consider Open Education:

• Textbook costs should not be a barrier to education
• Students learn more when they have access to quality materials
• Technology holds boundless potential to improve teaching and learning
• Open education promotes equity in higher education
• Better education means a better future
• Open education allows for continuous quality improvement
• Open education gives educators and learners control over content
• Open education supports true academic freedom
• Open pedagogy enables better pedagogy 

(SPARC, 2018 https://sparcopen.org/open-education/)

This fact sheet by Carrie Gits, SPARC Open Education Leadership Fellow, format modified by Joseph Dudley, System Librarian, Bryant & Stratton College, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  2018. This work is a remix of "Open Educational Resources (OER): A Fact Sheet for Adult Education" by Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education (OCTAE), OER to Support Adult STEM Teaching & Learning Project is licensed under CC BY 4.0