[Open-education] "How to OER" -- practical suggestions for educators & where to publish

Tue Apr 28 13:23:30 UTC 2015

Dear open education list,

I have a few practical questions regarding the topic of open education 
resources. However, as a new subscriber I should probably say hello 
first -- I'm Rens van der Heijden, a PhD candidate in Computer Science 
at Ulm University. I am responsible for the labs and practical parts of 
several computer security related courses here in Ulm (since 2012).

Several recent developments, including instructions from our legal 
department, have reminded me of the need for OER. In particular, some of 
our professors are now having second thoughts about publishing lecture 
slides, which for many courses is the primary source for the students, 
because these slides have developed over decades. Thus, no-one can 
really guarantee the material within is all public domain or 
sufficiently cited.
In addition, after some semesters of working on these courses, I would 
like the work I've spent on this to reach a wider public. Unlike many of 
our courses, this work is practically all in English, which makes it 
easier to re-use by others.
Finally, in collaboration with the student body for computer science, we 
are currently considering setting up some activities to stimulate both 
the use and actual publication of our work as OER.

With this background, I have a few questions that I did not really find 
answers to in the archives (at least, after a quick search):
1) What is the "best" place to publish my resources?
I've done a bit of searching, and there seem to be many places to 
download/use resources (e.g., wikiversity, and many suggestions at 
http://libguides.umuc.edu/content.php?pid=10994&sid=4062246 or 
http://www.unesco.de/bildung/open-educational-resources.html (German) ). 
However, a scary amount of these seems to be unreachable. In addition, 
it is not always clear how I can contribute work back, especially more 
practical work like exercises, quiz questions, lecture slides and 
demonstrations, as opposed to books.

2) What is the commonly suggested license for the resources?
I've started the habit of using CC0 as license for all the content I 
produce, unless there is some reason not to, but I'd like to also know 
what license is used by the state of the art. I've seen for example that 
the open university (open.edu) uses CC-BY-NC-SA, which means that we 
cannot use these resources, as our university receives money from the 
students (which in Germany at least means we cannot use NC content).

3) How do you deal with partial content, and how can we make coursework 
incrementally more open?
For many of our professors, one important reason (perhaps even THE 
reason) that OER is not implemented seems to be that we are dealing with 
legacy work, and there is no time between research and management to 
completely revise a lecture. Even when a lecture moves between 
professors, legacy content is often (re-)used, and it is definitely not 
possible to publish it as an OER. Moving over to OER is probably going 
be a multi-year process, and it would be very helpful if professors can 
share their content incrementally. Are there any best-practices or 
recommendations in this respect?

I would highly appreciate any suggestions you might have to offer. Thanks!

Regards,
Rens van der Heijden
PhD Candidate
Institute of Distributed Systems
Ulm University