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"A new survey of higher-ed faculty indicates OER use is on the brink of a sizable expansion."

"This post is for teachers and students who want to learn more, get going, and start using OER this year."

"The Delaware Department of Education (DDE) recently joined a national movement to use high-quality, openly licensed educational resources in schools. In support of the #GoOpen campaign, launched by the United States Department of Education's Office of Education Technology, Delaware will build a statewide repository of open educational resources (OER). "

""The implementation of an OER strategy is really difficult, and the assessment of an OER strategy is really difficult," he says. Lumen has helped to advance both. "That's unique," he says. "That's what they've contributed.""

"Yes, ownership is sort of implied in the "reuse" R, and is legally permitted by open licenses. But for all of their willingness to share access to open educational resources, how many OER publishers go out of their way to make it easy for you to grab a copy of their OER that you can own and control forever? "

Stacy Zemke has been named the Open Educational Resources (OER) Coordinator for the University of Oklahoma Libraries. As the OER Coordinator, Zemke will assist in the creation, promotion and utilization of open educational resources and open access content in support of OU's goal to reduce textbook costs through the development of open access educational resources for both students and faculty.

" it makes sense for Wiley (the publisher, not the dude) to strike a licensing deal with OpenStax. They're OK about not making a lot of money on the books as long as they can sell their WileyPlus software. Which, in turn, is why I think that Wiley (the dude, not the publisher) is not crazy at all when he predicts that "80% of all US general education courses will be using OER instead of publisher materials by 2018." I won't be as bold as he is to pick a number, but I think he could very well be directionally correct. I think many of the larger publishers hope to be winding down their traditional textbook businesses by 2018."

"Open educational resources rate as one popular strategy, with 92 percent of faculty members and 97 percent of administrators saying instructors should assign more of them. Still, past research has suggested many faculty members haven't heard of OER or don't know where to discover open content. David Wiley, chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, said the report builds on previous findings about OER."

""The goal is to build awareness on campus, so students know that OER brings textbook costs down and increases accessibility," said Professor Ching-Jung Chen, Digital Scholarship Librarian, who, working closely with the Provost's office, is spearheading the initiative at CCNY. "We also want faculty to recognize that there are resources on campus and colleagues who have already adopted OER successfully.""

"To better understand how states are using OER to meet curriculum and instructional materials needs, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and New America analyzed thousands of pages of state policies, legislation, and curriculum documents from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Based upon this nationwide scan, we homed in on 14 states undertaking innovative work leveraging OER and conducted in-depth interviews with education leaders from those states. "

"students using the openly licensed material were able to more efficiently internalize and remember the information conveyed. Students also rated the quality of the print version of the OER higher than the commercial equivalent, although the digital version received a lower ranking. The authors acknowledge that "the open textbook (in its first edition) and the commercial textbook (in its tenth) are written by different authors with differences in the breadth and depth of content coverage, organization, and writing style" and that a text's quality leans on several other factors besides the nature of its copyright."

Why invest lots of time, effort and energy creating new course materials from scratch when quality, freely-available resources may already exist? Why not adapt and use these resources, known as Open Educational Resources (OER)?

This report, funded by a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation with additional support from Pearson, examines the attitudes, opinions, and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) among teaching faculty in U.S. higher education.

"Special Issue: Outcomes of Openness: Empirical Reports on the Implementation of OER"

"Florida Virtual Campus is pleased to announce Florida's first Open Educational Resources Summit. Hear from Cable Green, director of Open Education and other national and campus leaders involved in defining and driving OER strategy and initiatives."

"To ensure that education is more relevant to the needs of students and the labour market, assessment methods need to be adapted and modernised. The use of ICT and open educational resources (OER) should be scaled-up in all learning contexts. Teachers need to update their own skills through regular training. The strategy also calls on Member States to strengthen links between education and employers, to bring enterprise into the classroom and to give young people a taste of employment through increased work-based learning. EU Education Ministers are also encouraged to step-up their cooperation on work-based learning at national and European level."

"Among faculty, cost (88% reporting as important or very important) and ease of use (86%) are most important for selecting online resources. The time and effort to find and evaluate are consistently listed as the most important barriers by faculty to the adoption of open education resources."

All of the issues around creating or using OER, of getting faculty towards supporting open access, of implementing inter-institutional open source software communities - all collapse before the MOOC.

Massive Online Open Course (MOOC): an online course or content aiming at large-scale interactive participation and open access. Open Educational Resources (OER): freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. ($): Requires some financial investment

OER can be looked upon as a process as well as a set of products. This is because educators need to rethink the way in which they create, use and distribute learning and teaching materials. Opening up learning and teaching materials does not equate to providing a free education. Open educational resources are components of a rich educational package which includes staff expertise, institutional facilities, tuition and feedback.