Open education aims to make education more accessible, inclusive, and equitable for everyone and is based on the idea knowledge is a public good that should be freely shared and reused. Open education advocates for the use of open educational resources (OER), which are teaching and learning materials that are openly licensed to allow anyone to use, adapt, and redistribute them without legal or technical barriers.
OER are centred around the 5 Rs of openness: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. These are the rights that users have over OER, which allow them to:
- Retain: make and own copies of the resource
- Reuse: use the resource in a variety of ways
- Revise: adapt, modify, or improve the resource
- Remix: combine the resource with other OER to create something new
- Redistribute: share the resource with others
By exercising these rights, users can customize OER to fit their own needs and contexts, as well as contribute to the improvement and innovation of educational materials. OER can also help reduce costs, increase access, and improve quality of education for learners and educators around the world.
Douglas College Resources on Open Education
DESC Articles on Open Education
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Free OER Book: ChatGPT Assignments to Use in Your Classroom Today
As part of DESC’s ongoing work to provide resources to educators across Douglas College, we provide the following Creative Commons licenced book from the University of Central Florida on creating assignments that incorporate AI chat tools such as ChatGPT. These … Continued
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Interested in Finding Open Educational Resources (OER) in your Subject Area?
To find Open Educational Resources (OER) by subject, visit the Douglas College Subject Guides where you will see the “Finding Open Educational Resources” tab on the sidebar menu on each Subject Guide. Here is an example from the Psychology Subject Guide where … Continued
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Beyond OER: The Promises, Pitfalls, and Potential of Open Education
Link to Robin DeRosa’s March 22, 2017 Slideshare presentation at Douglas College, New Westminster, BC Link to video recording of Robin DeRosa’s presentation at Douglas College