The UMFK OER Grant Program is an initiative of UMFK. Its primary goal is to compensate instructors for the work required to abandon costly, traditional course materials in favor of free and open course materials. The primary metric of success for this initiative is a reduction in what students spend on course materials.
Depending on the project, the award may be $500 or $1,000. See Grant award categories on the Home page.
The funding for Grants at UMFK will be reconsidered annually so that we can accommodate for budgets and/or new grants. In other words, at this time there is no guarantee of funding in any given year.
Adopting, edited from: AI Overview of adopting OER. (2024). Google AI [Large language model]. tinyurl.com/28bfqgqe
Adapting, edited from:: AI Overview of adapting OER. (2024). Google AI [Large language model]. tinyurl.com/227tvfdj
The term "open content" was coined in 1998 by David Wiley and was inspired by the open software movement. The prevalence of open educational resources and the community supporting them has been growing since.
Resources made freely available are not necessarily created for free. Most OER are written by academics and peer-reviewed. Furthermore, most who adopt OER are experts in their fields and are therefore optimally suited to judge a resource's quality.
Student success should be the driving incentive of an instructor to adopt OER; success via access to quality instructional materials. However, much like when instructors were offered grants to move from traditional classes to online, the OER grant provides additional compensation for those willing to adopt or adapt OER for their courses. These grants seek to ease the burden of switching from traditional to alternative resources.
In addition, creating OER may be an opportunity that could help toward promotion & tenure.
Ideally, faculty would receive a course release for adopting OER. However, that is a conversation UMFK faculty need to have among themselves. It may certainly count towards applications for Tenure & Promotion. Other non-monetary incentives may be such things as:
Funding to support the creation of OER typically comes from academic institutions, philanthropic organizations, and increasingly state and federal governments; however, some are created solely out of goodwill. The funding at UMFK has to be reconsidered annually so that we can accommodate for budgets and/or new grants when possible.
There really isn't one. Many OER initiatives do not profit or receive a return of any kind. The thinking is that OER will become the normal educational content delivery method in the future where maintenance costs are built into the responsibilities of universities. If that seems unsustainable, consider the following,
OER authors retain full copyright of the resources they create. In order to be considered OER a resource must have an open license.
A license explicitly states what a copyright holder allows others to do with their work. All rights reserved is a form of a license that limits the use of a resource to that which is allowed by fair use and nothing else. The non-profit Creative Commons has written and openly published a spectrum of legal statements that explicitly permit various uses of a resource. Other licenses also exist. The GNU Free Documentation License, for example, applies similar permissions to a work.
Between the years 2006 and 2016 college textbook prices increased at a rate more than three times that of inflation outpacing college tuition and fees. This significant increase is perceived as an indication that students are being taken advantage of when it comes to course materials.
OER also enables creative pedagogy, which may be limited when using traditional textbooks and resources. Instructors are not bound by what traditional textbooks require. Instead, instructors can expand and include student-created material so that the material is no longer just student-consumed but could also be student-created.
Yes, but . . . Legal licenses do exist to prevent commercial uses of otherwise free materials. Most notable is CC BY-NC. However, the most open licenses, the least restrictive licenses, do not prevent commercial uses. Most often commercial uses of OER are justified by there having been value added to the OER. In theory, it is that added value that end-users should pay for because the original OER is still available for free. "Added value" can be anything from supplemental chapters, updated illustrations, added quizzes, to wrapping the resource in an LMS where users pay for access to that LMS, etc.
OER falls under the broader category of open access. While OER may be adapted (modified or remixed) for a course or program based mainly on Creative Commons licensing, open access resources may include paid content or other content that cannot be modified such as library journal articles, database content, public domain materials, etc. unless otherwise noted.
Creative Commons Licenses are legal terms that supplement copyright not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable the modification of its terms to fit specific needs. Applying a Creative Commons License to a work can be thought of as changing the familiar,
"All rights reserved"
to
"Some rights reserved."
The only restriction is you cannot include those with ND or "No Derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted " clauses. A No Derivative clause removes the ability for a person to share work in an adapted form. In addition, when using other CC licensed material, pay attention to what their license allows or doesn't allow.
You don't. To apply the terms of a CC license to a work, simply choose a license using this wizard and insert its icon and its declaration into your work where you would typically include "All Rights Reserved" or "©". You'll find an example declaration at the bottom of this page.
The Clackamas Community College developed a chart that summarizes the number of hours per week for different types of OER projects. Hours range from 1-3 hours/week for 1 term to adopt an OER and up to 6-9 hours/week for 3 terms to author a completely new OER.
See the Chart that provides a useful breakdown.
All original content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. All linked content maintains its respective license.
Permission was granted by Jen Waller of the University Libraries at The University of Oklahoma to reuse and modify their guide originally called "Alternative Textbook Grant."