As Catherine Cronin (2017, p. 2) has explained,“Open educational practices (OEP) is a broad descriptor ofpractices that include the creation, use, and reuse of openeducational resources (OER) as well as open pedagogies andopen sharing of teaching practices.”

Open Educational Resources: freie Lehr- und Lernmaterialien

Blogs tend towards conversational and quotative reuse, which is great for some subject areas, but not so great for others. Wiki feeds forward into a consensus process that provides a high level of remix and reuse, but at the expense of personal control and the preservation of divergent goals. Wikity takes lessons from federated wiki, combining the individual control of blogging with the permissionless improvement of wiki.

Those students that bought the cheap version of the text back in 1991? They were pill-splitters. And they failed at pill-splitting (and maybe at the course). Do we own that failure? What we’ve learned over the past five years or so in OER is that what we sell in the Open Textbook movement is not just reduced cost. It’s the simplicity that you can get when you’re not working with an industry trying to milk every last dollar out of students. It’s every student having their materials on day one, for as long as they like, without having to navigate “simple” questions of what to buy, what to rent, and when-is-the-book-on-the-syllabus-that’s-required-not-really-required.

legal changes often lead to negative outcomes. New laws can limit use, introduce new payments or make open licensing incompatible with the given legal system. In such cases, OER advocates need to take a stance in defense of the existing rules.

not all of the resources needed for education will be openly licensed — for example, modern education requires use of cultural resources that are in copyright and will never be openly licensed. We therefore need good and balanced rules allowing educators acting in the public interest to use these resources.

the development of OER provides proof for the need of strong user rights in education. By looking at effects of successful OER projects we can describe a future educational reality, in which institutions, educators, and students benefit from a more liberal copyright law. Part of the success of Wikipedia as an education tool is the fact that no one accessing the site, or copying it for students, needs to worry: “Is this legal?”

Northern Virginia Community College’s Extended Learning Institute (ELI) and open courseware provider Lumen Learning announced a collaboration to publish 24 online college courses for two complete degree programs. All courses were developed for zero student cost using open educational resources (OER)