After finding appropriate Open Educational Resources (OER) to use, you will need to consider how you can effectively implement them in your teaching.

There are many aims that can be met by including OER in your courses, from simply providing a freely accessible alternative to an expensive textbook, to transforming your course to one with a more open, active pedagogy. On this page, we will outline the different approaches to using OER in your course.

The simplest form of working with OER is the “adopt and adapt” strategy. The first step is to adopt an existing OER, one that you have found after searching online and have evaluated as useful to you and your course to some extent (see our guide on searching and evaluating OER). In line with the definition of OER, this could simply be a single image or video, or something as large as a textbook. Provided the license for the OER is compatible with your plans, you can now use the adopted resource in your teaching, and redistribute it freely among your students and colleagues.

However, it may be that the OER is not in an optimal state for you to use it in your teaching as is. Perhaps it is written for an audience which already has a better understanding of the core principles behind your course, contains examples that do not make sense to your students, or simply does not fit nicely with your style of teaching and the existing materials for the course. You can then rely on the adapt aspect of this strategy, which enables you to change the material. Other than with copyright protected materials, you are free to remove, add, or alter sections of open materials. This way, you can change the material to fit your and your students' needs, rather than having to change the course to fit the material. In our guide on adapting and creating OER we provide a step-by-step of important considerations you need to consider when you want to adapt an OER.
 

Attribution of OER/Creative Commons works

When you use the adopt and adapt strategy, you have the benefit of not having to pay for the teaching material you use, and you also have more freedom in how you use the material. However, open licenses such as Creative Commons licenses require the user to give attribution to the copyright holder of the OER/work (see also our guide on copyright and open licenses). When incorporating OER in the classroom then, it is crucial to know how to properly give attribution.

You give proper attribution if your ensure that your attribution statement follows the TASL acronym:

• Title - what is the title of the work
• Author - who is the creator of the work
• Source - where did you find the work (with a clickable link to the page if the work is presented in an interactive medium)
• License - what are the conditions that need to be met if you want to use this work (with a clickable link to the license deed)

If not all information is clearly available, you can still use the work whilst omitting this information from the attribution. Generally, a link to the source is good enough in these cases. The attribution statement should be placed as close to the original work as possible, but if this is not feasible, you can create a separate page as well, provided you clearly indicate which work the attribution belongs to. In cases where additional attribution instructions are given, you should follow them closely. This open attrribution tool by Open Washington and licensed under a CC-BY 4.0 International License can help you generate a proper attribution statement.

The adopt and adapt strategy places teaching in the hands of the educator: they choose what material is used, and how that material is presented to the students. However, OER can also be a powerful tool to help flip the classroom, and make students active participants in their learning. As OER are highly malleable and accessible, students can directly work with, alter, and improve the materials that are used in a course. This allows for transformative assignments, the end results of which can be published openly and reused in future iterations of the same or other courses. This OER-enabled form of teaching is called open pedagogy, and the student-led creation of open educational materials is its key feature.

On the inspirational examples page of this LibGuide, you can find two interesting examples of open pedagogy in the form of the Biopsychology Signature Project of dr. Chris May of this university, and the Core 101 assignment of dr. Heather Micheli of Roger Williams University.
 

Communicating about open pedagogy with students

Open pedagogy is inherently a collaborative effort between the teacher and the students. Students become co-creators of materials, and these materials will be openly shared as well. However, it is not possible to simply switch open pedagogy from one week to another, as students need to be well informed regarding this style of teaching.

The concept of copyright and copyright holders plays a central role in open pedagogy, and needs to be communicated to students, for two reasons. The first is that students have copyright of what they create in class, whereas educators automatically transfer their copyright over created educational resources to the University of Groningen due to their positions as employees. This means students hold the rights to determine what happens with their created assignments, and they cannot be required to share these materials openly with the world. Therefore, before you commit to an open pedagogical approach, it is important to consider how you will tackle the following questions related to student autonomy:

• If students do not want to openly share their completed assignments, how will you ensure that they still get fair treatment in their assessment, and can pass the class without penalty?
• How will you ensure that students retain the option to change their name on any published material (if they initially chose to include it), and how will you communicate to them that it is not possible to guarantee that their name is fully removed due to them being present on any copied sources (as allowed per the license)?

Communicating these questions and your answers to them early to your students (for instance, in the syllabus) can help with getting them on board for your plans to engage in open pedagogy. Additionally, creating a contract with your students, where the agreements between you and the students regarding how these materials are to be created and processed are outlined in clear terms is highly recommended: copyright is a legal matter, so having written, explicit agreements is very useful.

Secondly, students need to be made aware of the basics of copyright, open licensing, and OER as well. As students will work directly with materials, altering them to fit with their assignment, it is important that they have a basic knowledge of copyright, know how to identify the copyright or licensing status of a resource, and know where to find open materials. This way, students can ensure that only use applicable materials, which will prevent problems with third parties down the road. Our guides on copyright and open licensing, and searching and evaluating OER are good starting points for educators that want to communicate about these requirements to students.
 

Didactic concerns are crucial to effective open pedagogy

In our guide on adapting or creating OER, and our guide on evaluating OER, we mention how didactic concerns are crucial in determining whether an OER is fit for your course, and how you may want to adapt an existing OER or create a new one. For open pedagogy, these concerns may be even more important, as this form of teaching drastically changes how teaching and learning happens in the classroom. Therefore, it is important to keep concepts such as learning goals, constructive alignment, and backwards design in mind when engaging in open pedagogy. Therefore, if you want help with implementing open pedagogical practices in your classroom, it is advised to contact the didactic experts at Education Support and Innovation (ESI): docentprofessionalisering@rug.nl.

With the information in this guide, we hope you now have an idea on how to implement OER in your teaching. If you need more support or have questions regarding using OER, you can reach the OER support services at: oer-library@rug.nl, and the didactic experts at Education Support and Innovation (ESI): docentprofessionalisering@rug.nl.

In our other guides, we outline what OER are, how copyright is related to OER, why OER can/should be used in the classroom, where you can find suitable OER yourself, how you can create your own OER, and how you can share your own work as an OER with the world.