Kate McNally Carter and Ariana Santiago
Open education, broadly speaking, encompasses open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP).
What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning resources in the public domain, or they have been licensed in such a way that allows anyone to freely use, modify, and repurpose them. They are typically licensed with a Creative Commons license, which provide users a variety of options to reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute the material according to the terms of its specific license. OER can be any kind of learning resource, including full textbooks, lab manuals, and courses, as well as smaller learning components, such as activities, lesson plans, videos, assessments, and more.
When OER are used, all students have free access to the course materials, which means that adopting OER can potentially remove textbook costs entirely from a course. The open license also allows instructors to modify and remix OER, which enables them to customize materials to students’ learning needs and their local context.
Open educational practices go beyond these benefits and provide a way to engage students in the classroom as information creators.
What are Open Educational Practices (OEP) and Renewable Assignments?
Open Educational Practices (OEP) are practices that draw from OER and focus on flexible and collaborative learning. For example, OEP could include the creation, use, and reuse of OER and open pedagogical practices that directly involve students in the creation of OER.
Renewable assignments are a really important component of open educational practices that engage with students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it. They provide students with opportunities to engage in meaningful work, add value to the world, and provide a foundation for future students to learn from and build upon. In short, renewable assignments are those in which students are invited to openly license and publicly share their work as OER to benefit other learners. The student-created works then have an opportunity to live outside the classroom in a way that has an impact on the greater community.
Renewable assignments are typically contrasted with the traditional disposable assignment, which students throw away after they are graded. Instead, a renewable assignment invites students to develop resources for their coursework that have use beyond just getting the grade. This gives them an opportunity to not only develop something that could be useful for future learners, but it also gives students a reason to more fully invest in their work and create better quality content since they know that others will use it.
UH instructors can reach out to Open Education Services in the UH Libraries with questions about this topic via email: oer@uh.edu.
The contents of this page were written by Katherine M. Carter & Ariana Santiago, licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors: Katherine M. Carter & Ariana Santiago. Website: UH Libraries. Book title: Let’s Read Together. Original publication date: April 16, 2025. Location: Houston, Texas. Book URL: https://uhlibraries.pressbooks.pub/readtogetherbystudents/.
