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OXP Open Education Guide

Welcome to the OXP Open Education Guide

This guide supports the work of the Online and Extended Programs office by clearly defining components of Open Education, directing users to appropriate resources, and answering common questions. The main page of this guide covers definitions of terms related to open education, an introduction to those terms applied to course marking, and more information on how to get in contact with additional experts.

Open Education Terms & Definitions

Open Educational Resources (OER) are materials that support learning – from textbooks to videos to digital learning objects to practice problems. These resources support teaching and learning in classrooms across the nation, and the globe. Once an OER is created it is involved in the ecosystem of the 5Rs: Retain, Reuse, Remix, Revise, Redistribute.

  • Visit our OER Page for more information on how to get support with OER at TXST, or
  • Visit SPARC's Open Education to learn more about the Open Education movement

OER are often licensed using a Creative Commons licenses, and as we see the expansion of teaching and learning materials we are seeing new types of open licenses emerge for specific resources types, like software. Carnegie Mellon University has an open source license comparison grid that illustrates the permissions, conditions, and limitations of some of these license types. 

Open Access - “Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do – accelerate research.” – Scholarly Publishing and Research Coalition (SPARC) 

Differentiating between Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Access (OA) can be challenging, especially since OER is a subset of Open Access with the intent for the material to evolve. Anita Walz, created a useful resource that I have added as an image here, as a PDF asset below, and you can find the full abstract here.  

 

Open Education and Course Marking

Course marking is just that! Marking courses in a way that makes it clear to those registering what the course entails. Some great examples are writing intensive courses. Texas legislation establishes similar expectations for OER courses, and more information is provided by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating board Digital Learning Division in their Texas OER Core Elements Course.

State Requirements for Searchable Course Information: Four Crucial Questions
What?
The Texas law (SB 810) requires that institutions of higher education provide searchable information to students about OER-only courses. It defines OER as "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that allows for free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others, including full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." 

Who?
The requirement applies to all public and private institutions of higher education in the state of Texas.

When?
The requirement applied beginning in Spring 2018.

Why?
SB 810 amends existing price disclosure laws to increase transparency in communicating with students about resources required for their educational pursuits. 

More information can be found in Unit 13: OER in Texas: Statewide Practices and Supports of the Texas OER Core Elements Course. 

Understanding all the intricacies and what ifs of course materials can be challenging. Here are a few course material examples, and how they would currently be marked in our system. 

  • Courses with only Open Educational Resources (OER) receive the 'No cost' label
  • Courses with only Freely Accessible Content receive the 'No Cost' label
  • Courses with only Library Resources receive the 'Low Cost' label
  • Courses with University Resources receive the 'Low Cost' label
  • Courses with Resources under $50 receive the 'Low Cost' Label
  • Courses with Resources above $50 receive no label

Courses that use a low cost component result in a course that receives a low cost label. For example if Resources under $50 are used and OER is used, the course is labeled 'Low Cost'.

Courses that use resources over $50 receive no label. For example if a publisher material over $50 is used and an OER are used, the course does not receive a label. 

Course Marking Terms 

  • OER - Open Educational Resources
  • Freely Accessible - Resources that are free to access, but are not OER. Often these types of content are Open Access, though not always
  • Library Resource - Resources available via University Libraries
  • University Resource - Resources available to TXST University students, staff, and faculty
  • Resource under $50 - Materials under $50 USD
  • At cost Material, Over $50 - Materials over $50 USD

Example Course: This course uses Library Resources and OER

First, identify the Library Resource column, indicated by star in the top right hand corner of the box.

Second, identify the OER row, indicated by a circle in the top right hand corner of the box.

Next we follow the column and row until they intersect, indicated by the arrows.

The box at the intersection of these materials is the course label for that course

 Texas State University Office of the University Registrar - Open Educational Resources