Preparing teaching resources, assessments, and homework material for class can be a hugely time-consuming job as an educator. Sometimes it feels like reinventing the wheel, especially when teaching a topic that’s been covered by generations of educators before. At the same time, you want to have more capacity to personalize your lessons and resources to meet your students’ individual needs.
The answer is to draw on existing materials in the form of open educational resources (OERs). These public domain or freely available materials can help save you valuable hours so you can focus on supporting your students.
In this guide, we’ll run through practical ways to use OERs in the classroom to make teaching more efficient and richer in breadth, without needing a huge budget.
Key Takeaways
- OERs are freely available educational materials and programs that you can use or adapt for your students at no cost.
- Using OERs can save you valuable time as a teacher, as well as letting you diversify your teaching materials and personalize them for your students.
- OERs can support creative teaching techniques like flipped learning and real-world context research projects.
- Open-source digital assessment can make it quicker and easier to deliver engaging and innovative testing in your classroom.
What Are Open Educational Resources?
OERs are teaching, learning, and assessment materials in any medium that are freely available for educators to use. This may be because they are public domain, meaning they are not under copyright. Either they never have been, or have become so over time, such as older works of literature where copyright has lapsed.
OERs may also be open source (tools where the code, content, or design is free for everyone to use and change) or open license (under an open-source license agreement, meaning they can be freely used and transformed for non-commercial use as per the terms).
Examples of OERs that may be useful include free online courses, videos, podcasts, articles and blogs, literary works, and datasets. You may also find opportunities to use open-source software that can enhance your teaching.
Why Might Educators Use OERs?
There are several key benefits of using OERs in the classroom, such as:
- Saving time: Rather than writing all your materials from scratch, using existing resources as a basis can be a big time-saver.
- Saving money: Free resources mean you don’t need to splash out on fancy textbooks, software programs, or worksheet sets.
- Using a diverse range of media: Today’s students are used to a multimedia world where they frequently interact with video, audio, and even more advanced tech like augmented reality. OERs can allow you to integrate multimedia into your classroom without needing a media suite to create your own.
- Including a diverse range of viewpoints: With free online resources, you can access teaching materials from around the world. This could include videos from other countries, for example, or literature from other cultures.
- Enabling student-led learning: Many OERs are easy for students to access at home or in class at their own pace.
- Making personalization easier: You could adapt OERs to make them more accessible for learners with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), or assign different resources to students to suit their individual needs and progress levels.
4 Examples of OERs in the Classroom
There are many different ways you might integrate OERs into education practices. As a starting point, you could try the following:
-
Flipped classroom using multimedia materials
A flipped classroom sees your students work through preparatory materials on their own, whether that’s at home or as a self-directed part of a lesson. When you bring students back together, you can then use engaging activities like debates, creative interpretations, group presentations, or experiments to cement their learning and develop their understanding further.
OERs can support a flipped classroom very effectively. Because they are free to access and usually online, students can use OERs at home or at school on their own devices. By presenting learners with a list of relevant OERs, they can also select their own path through the topic, which can be more engaging. Because of the time saved, you could present a wider range of resources than if you needed to create everything from scratch.
I’ve used the flipped classroom model when teaching history. For example, I asked students to research the causes of World War I independently using video documentaries and online articles, before bringing their ideas to the classroom for a debate.
-
Classic literature study using public domain works
A huge number of classic novels, plays, and poems are available in the public domain. This means you can find the entire text online, and you and your students are free to copy, use, and adapt this as you wish.
In most countries, works enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the author, while in the United States, everything published before 1930 counts in this category. This includes works by Shakespeare, Austen, Poe, and Dickens. Project Gutenberg is one key database for free online literature.
In a literature class, this means you can assign reading to your students without expecting them to buy their own copy of the book (or spending your departmental budget on a new set). You can also print and copy sections for annotation and deep analysis, or adapt the size and font for SEND students. With the freedom to transform the work, you could ask students to make their own interpretations. For example, how about a modern version of Romeo and Juliet set in their own neighborhood?
-
Research project using open datasets
In subjects like geography, social science, psychology, or biology, you might want your students to develop more advanced research skills using large datasets. After all, this kind of analysis could be important if they want to move on to further study or a technical workplace. But gathering large amounts of data can be very difficult in a school setting.
This is where open data sources come in. These may be gathered by universities or government departments and shared openly online for anyone to use. For example, you could use the US Census as a source, or global development statistics from the World Bank. These real-world datasets allow students to engage with up-to-date, meaningful information and practice their analytical skills in an engaging context.
-
Computer-based assessment using open source software
Digital assessment can make testing more streamlined and engaging for you and your students. If you have an existing hosting framework and some tech skills, or a team in your institution who can help, you can download and use open-source software like TAO for free.
With TAO, you can design and build online assessments using a range of question types that can also integrate multimedia and interactive elements for an innovative testing style. The software updates for free as the company introduces new developments, and you can also dock into other programs, meaning you’re not locked into one vendor.
Digital assessment can work well in all subjects, but it’s particularly effective in practical subjects like science. For example, interactive question types can allow students to manipulate objects on the screen, such as virtual measuring instruments or scientific equipment, to demonstrate what they think might happen in an experiment.
With digital assessment software, you can also enhance equity for SEND students, with easily implemented support and accommodations, including dictionaries, supportive imagery, and extra time.
Tying Into Practice
OERs can help educators put together an engaging curriculum with diverse, multimedia resources, without needing a huge budget or tons of time to create their own. They also make it easier to implement innovative teaching techniques like flipped learning and computer-based assessment, as well as increasing equity for SEND students.
As a next step, check out where you can find the best high-quality OERs for supplementing curriculum or creating engaging digital assessments. You might also explore how to integrate remote and in-person teaching using OERs as a basis.
Find Out More About Open Source Digital Assessment
OERs can help you design and deliver digital assessments with less hassle by using existing materials to build out your tests. With a combination of exciting resources and computer-based assessment, you can unlock new ways to test your students in a more engaging, streamlined, and innovative way.
If you’re interested in exploring TAO’s open-source assessment platform—or more supported versions of the software—get in touch for a demo.
