OER 101: OER Lingo

Key OER Lingo

Open Educational Resources (OER)
“Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. OER include a variety of materials: from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.”
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation

Accessibility
Accessibility is the ability to access a learning resource by an individual with physical, sensory, cognitive or learning disabilities. Additionally, accessibility ensures that content is free from bias against gender, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. OERs are unique because they define accessibility as both the removal of cost barriers and the need to present information in many forms, allowing learners to acquire, process, and express knowledge in multiple ways.

Adapt / Remix
Adapting or remixing OERs is using one or more existing open resources and adding, subtracting, changing sequence, combining or otherwise modifying the resource to meet the requirements of the class or the learners. Care should be taken t when adapting/remixing to follow the permissions of the original licenses.

Adopt
Adopting means to use an OER in its original form to replace existing course materials that students were required to purchase for a course. No changes are made to the original OER material when it is adopted.

Backward Design
An educational curriculum design method of setting learning goals before choosing learning activities and assessment methods. This method keeps the focus on learning outcomes, rather than teaching activities.

Create
Creating OERs means to produce an original teaching or learning resource, digital or otherwise, and place it under a Creative Commons License for others to use, share, adapt and reuse.

Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization which encourages sharing and discovery of creative works by providing free legal and technical tools. It provides free licenses in order to make creative work easy to search for and use.

Creative Commons Licensing
Creative Commons Licenses are a free licensing system that allows the author of a work to specify how that work can be used by others. Even though the author retains full copyright, the Creative Commons (CC) license gives others the legal permission to copy and use the work. Creative Commons Licenses are not an alternative to copyright. The licenses apply on top of copyright, so you can modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs.

Inclusive Classroom
An inclusive classroom is a general education classroom where students with and without disabilities learn together.

Instructional Design
Instructional Design is the process of determining the needs of learners, defining learning goals to meet those needs and creating, designing and developing instruction materials, both digital and physical, to help the learners acquire that knowledge.

Open Educational Practices / Open Pedagogy
Open Educational Practices are teaching practices that design lessons and assessments using Open Educational Resources and shift the teaching to engage students in knowledge creation instead of knowledge consumption.

Universal Design
Universal Design (UD) means offering flexible learning environments thus reducing the need for special accommodation for students with disabilities. UD accommodates individual learning differences, and offers equal opportunities for success by presenting information in different formats, providing distinct ways students can express learning, and multiple types of motivation for learning.

Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC)
Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) classes are classes that have no conventional textbook or course material costs including no access code costs. Course material is replaced with alternate instructional materials, including OERs, library materials and teacher created resources.