1. Open Education Resources (OER): Practicalities for Schools
October 8, 2018

2. What, exactly, are OER? Not all free materials are OER
Not all digital materials are OER
The key to OER is that they are resources (everything from a single graphic to a full-fledged online course) created and then shared with others who can use, change, and re-share the resource, based on their needs.
Important to note that not all OER are digital. Teachers, in fact, have been sharing their own created resources for decades, way before computers were added to our teaching toolboxes, but without anyone having any legal standing. Is this important? Yes, because teachers often don’t know anything about where this great resource that was shared at a conference came from. There is no responsibility attached. There are no rights for the creator attached. OER make this sharing process more visible and a lot less messy.

3. Copyright is at the heart of OER
Creators of material own the legal copyright unless there is an agreement to assign that ownership to another entity (such as an employer or a grant institution)
No one can use the legally copyrighted materials without being given a “license” from the copyright owner
The strength of OER is that teachers can easily and quickly use these materials when they are personalizing learning for students. There is no need to worry about asking permission to use or adapt resources, that permission has already been granted. Traditional copyright requires teachers to ask the copyright owner for permission, then to keep records of any permission granted, and is usually time consuming. Fair Use provides some flexibility but is very vague and is based on a judgment call. Many teachers aren’t willing to risk a lawsuit based on a judgment call.

4. Creative Commons Copyright
Creative Commons copyright designations can be used rather than the traditional copyright designation (which means the copyright owner retains all the rights to use, re-purpose, or share their work). Creative Commons licenses allow the owner to choose to give some rights to others upfront, without them having to ask.
There are different rights that can be granted to others through the Creative Commons license. The different rights are indicated by codes. For teachers who want to share with other educators, the most common Creative Commons licenses bestow the right to re-use, re-purpose, and re-share their creations. However, teachers retain their right to be acknowledged as the creator of the original material (it is common practice to provide a link back to the original creation and include a short summary of changes made).

5. Priority #1: Who owns the copyright?
Teacher work created under contract hours
Teacher work created during own time
Work done by groups of teachers
Work created through grants
Student work created for school
All of these situations must be clarified as to copyright ownership. The first two may already be clarified in your division’s employment contact. The others are often determined on a case by case basis. But if you want to encourage teachers to create OER, you need to give them clear rights and guidelines so they know beforehand how their work will be considered. In cased where the division owns the copyright, there should be a policy to designate all such materials to be Creative Commons licensed as OER (unless conditions of a grant require otherwise).
In general, the creator of any work is the copyright owner. However, in the case of businesses, usually the business owns the copyright of the work created on their behalf by an employee. Court cases go both ways for educators, so there is not a set rule of law on teacher’s work.

6. Priority #2: Determine Creative Commons license
For educators, the most common choices are
Public domain (No restrictions on use by others)
CC BY (others can use your material without any restrictions except that you are credited for the original work)
CC BY-SA (others can use your material without any restrictions except noting credit to you, but they must re-share anything they base on your work with others freely)
CC BY-NC-SA (others can use your material without any restrictions except noting credit to you, but they must re-share anything they base on your work with others freely—except the material may not be used for commercial purposes)
Creative Commons licenses are not all alike—the copyright owner gets to decide what rights to retain and what ones to keep. Creative Commons is created specifically for artists and educators, so there is much more flexibility than the traditional copyright designation. If you want to really share with others, these designations are most common but there are others that keep anyone from editing or adapting your work.

7. Priority #3: What do you have to share already?
Have you already been collecting OER?
To prepare to share statewide:
Check to make sure they are current (no broken URLs, aligned to current SOL, don’t require outdated software)
Double-check no copyrighted material is included (or there is a record of permission granted)
If documents are not editable, see if they can be converted to editable versions
Check accessibility
Several Virginia school divisions have already been collecting and sharing teacher-created materials (and sometimes materials created by curriculum specialists). It would be helpful for those divisions to now share these materials statewide. However, it would be a great idea to review them before offering them—especially if they were created more than a year or so ago.
Some obvious things to check for include no broken URLs and that the resources are aligned to any new SOL releases. However, if you have any resources that require a specific software to function, you should check and make sure they work on the latest versions. Always double-check to make sure no copyrighted material was used as part of the resource. If it was, either permissions have to be granted that allow the copyrighted material to be used as part of OER, or substitutions need to be found. Another thing to remember is that one of the points of OER is that others can take your materials and edit them to suit their own needs. It’s important to make your resources as easily editable as possible.
Last but not least, all materials these days should be created with accessibility in mind, but most especially those created for direct use by students. This is a legal requirement, not just a nice thing to do.

8. Moving Forward: Introduction to OER
Introduce OER to all faculty and demonstrate how it can help them with personalization
Create local sharing spaces on statewide OER platform
Develop spaces and times that groups of teachers can work together on resources and begin to build trust among your participants
To encourage teachers to create and share OER, it helps to show them WHY OER can be useful to them. However, realize that not all teachers will be willing to create materials and share freely with others. 100% participation is not required. Still, focus on personalization in the context of the Profile of the Virginia Graduate and the 5 C’s. This is not a separate initiative—it is a supportive one.
The new OER platform will allow divisions and even individual schools to have closed spaces within the system, where teachers can begin sharing in a safe environment. They know and trust the others who will be seeing their created materials, who might have suggestions or additions to suit their own students. It may take time to build trust in other educators outside of their own group. Begin doing that early in the process as part of your school/division culture building, and find ways that teachers can have time to work together in groups.

9. Moving Forward: Basics
Help teachers with searching for CC resources and identifying the CC license permissions
Encourage re-purposing of resources found as first experience in OER
Help teachers learn how to cite OER in their own work
Help teachers learn how to designate a CC license in their own work
There will need to be direct training (not necessarily face-to-face) for a few skills teachers will need. Learning how to use search parameters to find CC licensed resources and then learning how to interpret the different licenses is a good place to start.
Unless you have teachers who have materials they want to share immediately, you may want to start by encouraging them to use an existing OER and re-purpose it for their classroom, with a specific student or group of students in mind.
They also need to know how to cite OER when they use someone else’s work to create something for themselves. The final step is learning how to designate and mark their materials with a CC license. It is probably most helpful to have these as recorded screen-capture tutorials (or step-by-step written tutorials) since teachers will not be using this knowledge all that frequently.

10. Moving Forward: Polishing Diamonds
Encourage teachers to share “diamonds in the rough” with few barriers
Teach teachers how to use the statewide OER platform to upload their resources in local spaces (including assigning metadata)
Encourage teachers to respectfully “polish” others’ work and re-purpose it in various ways
It’s important for everyone to understand that OER don’t start out as sparkling, polished resources. They start out as a need or an idea. To ask that teachers develop polished resources is to shut down the ability of most teachers to participate. They are already stressed for time. Encourage them to share their resources as they are without asking for much more than accuracy and correct grammar. If teachers share with their local trusted groups, then they can each work on polishing up the work of others.
The new platform will have specific tools for teachers to upload resources. They need to learn to use these tools (which are relatively easy and intuitive) but just as importantly they need to understand how much a role metadata plays in OER success. Their ability to identify their materials so that teachers who are looking for just such resources is essential.
If your teachers have not yet worked in small groups to help each other with resources, you may want to have a short session on how to respectfully suggest edits, changes, etc.

11. Moving Forward: Sharing Statewide
Develop review teams and processes as desired for materials to be shared statewide
Checklists or rubrics should include
Re-usability (ability to edit)
UDL/Accessibility
Attention to pedagogy (does this support the 5C’s as well as content?)
If you find some “diamonds” in your teachers resources, you may want to have a process by which you release these resources for the state system. The process can include rubrics to help make sure the OER meet criteria and include desirable attributes.
The big things to include:
Re-usability (How easy can the resource be edited? Was it created using specialized software which makes it uneditable by anyone without that software?)
UDL/Accessibility (Follow the usual accessibility rules for documents. Do you include a script or captions for multimedia materials?)
Pedagogy (Are the majority of materials just ‘worksheets’ for content recall? Where do the 5 C’s fit in? How does this help us address the Profile of a Virginia Graduate?)

12. Our Statewide OER Commons site
Contract just awarded to build a Virginia hub
We hope to have our basic site up by December and ready to be used by March 2019
See oercommons.org