 Welcome to this introductory video on active learning in OER. In this video, we'll be exploring what an open educational resource is and how you can use them in conjunction with active learning techniques to open up your teaching. Let's start with the basics. What is an OER? Open Educational Resources, or OER, are teaching resources that are free of cost and access barriers and which also carry legal permissions for open use, which allows anyone to freely use, adapt, and share the resource. This can be broken down into two key concepts. OER are open because they are free to access and because they come with permissions for open use. You might ask, what permissions? Well, the permissions inherent to OER are encapsulated by the five Rs, a set of rights for users which include the rights to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute copies of open content. In other words, as an instructor, you can adapt an OER to meet your course's unique needs by removing a chapter you don't teach, translating content into your native language, or by simply adding more examples that are relevant for your students. If an open educational resource can be any free, openly licensed learning material, that means there are a lot of different options for what an OER can be. This definition encompasses a wide variety of materials from textbooks and lab books to videos and simulations. However, OER have never been the only important piece in the field of open education. Another important piece, particularly for our topic today, is open pedagogy. Open pedagogy looks beyond course materials and asks us to consider how we're opening and including students in their learning. As Catherine Cronin defined it, open pedagogy might be seen as collaborative practices that include the creation, use, and reuse of OER, as well as pedagogical practices employing participatory technologies and social networks for interaction, peer learning, knowledge creation, and the empowerment of learners. Sound familiar? Yeah, it sounds a lot like active learning. Active learning is often defined as an approach to teaching that shifts the focus from a sage-on-the-stage approach to a more collaborative student-centered design. Open pedagogy might be seen as a type of active learning then, one which endeavors to center openness in the final outcomes of the learning process. But how is open pedagogy practiced? Well, there are a lot of different models, but it's easiest to conceptualize open pedagogy through its assignments. Here I have a few examples of open pedagogy assignment types. First is annotation, which might include working with students to annotate a reading used in the classroom by highlighting important passages or commenting on sections that are particularly interesting or thought provoking for them as a learner. Second is curation, wherein students pull together resources they found separately to share with one another and showcase what they've learned through outside research on your course topic. Third is updating or editing course content. This might be handled through a peer review process, wherein students comment on an OER assigned to your course and provide feedback on how it might be improved, or through a collaborative editing process, wherein students take pre-existing course materials and update them with things they've learned in your course meetings. This is where those five R permissions for OER come in handy. Because an open educational resource is open, you can adapt a copy of the content based on feedback from students to make the resources you use more relevant to your course. And finally, our last example is creating exercises and core course materials with students. In the former case, students might create test banks to help test one another's and their own understanding of your course content. In the latter case, students might help create a course reader or textbook demonstrating their learning and their grasp of your course content while creating something that can help educate others. These open pedagogy assignments are very similar to some of the examples listed on CELT's 226 Active Learning Techniques handout, which includes things like allowing students to compare notes and develop questions about what they've learned, having students peer review one another's writing, or working with students in groups to reflect on the lecture and discuss what they've learned. The one piece that makes open pedagogy different is that a final outcome of the work might be shared openly outside of the classroom or reused in future classes to support students who come after your current session ends. So now that I've had a chance to introduce this topic, I'd like to share a few considerations to keep in mind for those of you interested in exploring OER or open pedagogy in your classrooms. Specifically, consider how an open approach might help improve your class. For example, you might ask yourself, what experiences will drive my students to remember the most important topics in my class? What about my current material isn't speaking to students? And can they diagnose and fix that? What materials do I need? And how can students help me create those materials? Or how can my students help other students connect with my content? Regardless of where you end up, what's important is that you focus on teaching as a student-centered experience. The reason why open educational resources are popular isn't just because they're free, though the equity and affordability of OER are certainly a huge benefit. Open Education is also popular because it looks beyond materials to consider how a course can become a more open, inclusive, and participatory environment for students who want to have the opportunity to showcase their learning. If you're interested in exploring open pedagogy or adopting OER for your courses, you can get support from our team. Support available at the Iowa State University Library includes assistance locating content, training, financial support, and more. Thank you for watching. This video is also an example of an OER, and it's available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. If you have additional questions about this topic, feel free to reach out or visit our website at oer.istate.edu.