Get Up To Speed with OER

Putting a Creative Commons license on your online learning resource is necessary but not enough to make it an OER. To be Open, an OER must make possible, or hopefully make easy, the kinds of use that the license allows.

• A high school teacher wants your OER but she wants to rearrange the chapters and add one of her own, and she can't afford fancy software on a poor public school district budget.
• A professor in China wants to use your OER in his class, but he needs to translate it into Mandarin. Some proprietary software we're accustomed to using isn't legally available in China, but Open Source software is.
• A teacher of blind students wants to add a better audio description track to your OER. (Presumably you did your best to make your video accessible, but she has more experience in how to make things accessible in that way.) 
• 15 years from now, an instructional designer at SUNY Empire wants to put your OER in a course, but it's going to need to be technologically updated to work with current computers. 
• A university in a country recovering from colonialism wants to make your OER work on mobile devices with low bandwidth for use by the rural poor, but they are required by a law in their country to use Open Source software.
• A gifted teenager in a remote area has an idea for a youth inventors contest and would be building off your OER, but only has access to Linux based computers.

It shouldn't matter that a potential user lives in another country, speaks another language, uses another hardware platform or operating system, has a disability, has low bandwidth or processing power, can't purchase a certain kind of software, or lives decades from now. They need access and they need to be able to adapt it and create derivative works from it.

The Source File Must Be Available

The source file needs to be available, not just the finished product. When you put a video on YouTube, the user can watch it, but they don't get a copy of it to keep. There are some tools that would allow them to create a video file from the YouTube video, but it wouldn't be great quality. If the video disappears or they want to edit it, they're out of luck. So the creator of the video needs to make a downloadable copy of the file available.

But the file that the user plays is not always the same as the file that the creator edits, especially when it comes to interactive resources. You must provide not only a downloadable copy of the finished product, but also a downloadable copy of the source file, so that it can be edited and remixed. 

The Source File Must Be In An Editable Format

Not all applications are Open Source and not all the file formats they produce are Open Format. Some very popular software applications cost a lot of money and are not available worldwide. And in years or decades, if the application is no longer profitable, it may no longer be available, or updated to work with contemporary operating systems. If the owner of the software copyright has not made it Open, files edited and read by that application will no longer be usable.

If I want my Open Educational Resources to be truly Open, I need to create them with other software that is Open Source. That way, if worse comes to worse, somebody can find an old copy of the application's source code, make the necessary changes to it, and access my OER and bring it up to date for the technology and audiences of their time.

Open Source applications are not always as full-featured and beautiful as their for-profit counterparts (although sometimes they really are best in class!) but the advantage is that they are adaptable and stand the test of time.

We are not even talking on the scale of centuries. Technological obsolescence can happen in less than ten years, so this is important at a very practical and self-interested level.

Next, watch What Is Open Source, by ComputerFloss (4:32). 

Open Source software is often, but not always free. Proprietary software is sometimes free. 

Open Source software always produces open format files. Proprietary software sometimes does too. 

The difference isn't just the cost or the output file format, but what you are or aren't allowed to do with the source code to make the software available and adapt it to your needs. 

It is absolutely necessary to make your OER in an open file format. It is desirable to use Open Source software, but other factors can come into play, such as what your institution wants you to use, and how much time and effort you want to put into learning a new tool. 

Even if you use expensive, non-Open Source Microsoft Word to create an OER in PDF format, I can take that OER and edit it in LibreOffice (which s Open Source), because the .PDF format is a non-proprietary format.