Open Learning (Standalone Pages)
Open Educational Resources and Practices
The Center for Distributed Learning has a dedicated team of instructional designers who specialize in supporting faculty interested in Open Education.
This team empowers faculty to
- discover open resources for teaching and learning,
- identify basic principles of open licensing and its application(s),
- apply mechanisms for open resource adoption (e.g. reuse/remix),
- utilize existing open resources in instructional settings,
- create new open resources for academic use, and
- conduct research on open academic practices.
What is Open Education?
Open education involves creating and/or utilizing existing teaching and learning materials that are freely available to all users—without the restrictions of proprietary systems that limit the sharing of academic content and data.
Why is Open Education Important at UCF?
Education contributes to the social and economic evolution of humanity, and as a public institution of higher education, our mission is to contribute to the public good. By openly sharing our resources, research, and practices, we not only open the doors of education to our UCF community, but to communities across the globe.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
“Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.”
Find Open and/or Free Educational Resources for Your Course(s)
Textbooks
- Pressbooks (Directory)
- OASIS (Referatory)
- LibreTexts (Repository)
Images / Videos / Simulations
Create Open and/or Free Educational Resources for Your Course(s)
Use the following tools to kickstart your content authoring experience.
Open Educational Practices (OEP)
Open Educational Practices (OEP) include the teaching, learning, and administrative processes around the strategic implementation of Open Educational Resources (OER) in a course, program, or institution.
Examples of OEP span from having students co-create academic content with their instructor(s) to designing open standards and policies to proliferate the use of OER.
One practice that deserves particular attention in terms of university faculty is the concept of Open Pedagogy.
“Open Pedagogy…is a site of praxis: A place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures….An access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education AND a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable students to shape the public knowledge commons of which they are a part.”
Incorporate Open Educational Practices into Your Course(s)
- The Values of Open Pedagogy (Sinkinson, 2018)
- Teaching with OER: Open Pedagogy (Elder, 2019)
- My Open Textbook: Pedagogy and Practice (DeRosa, 2016)
- Open Pedagogy Approaches (Clifton and Davies Hoffman, 2020)
- Open Pedagogy Notebook (website)
- Teaching with OER, Open Pedagogy, and Working with Learners (website)
Champions of Open
Champions of Open maintain the belief that higher education is a human right [“equally accessible to all” UDHR, Art.26], characterized by high levels of academic freedom and low barrier to instructional materials.
If you are interested in learning more about how your fellow colleagues have incorporated open educational resources and practices to support their students (or if you have a story of your own that you would like to share), view the stories below for some examples and advice (or submit your story).
Champions in Action
“True impact is best measured not by numbers, but by the words of our students [….] We are so grateful for your collective efforts and example you set for other departments across campus.” @UCF @UCFSciences @UCFPhysics @UCFDigitalLearn #UCFopen #OER pic.twitter.com/MZgOe1CZvo
— James Paradiso (@paradisojr) February 19, 2021
If you would like to learn more about Open Educational Resources and Practices (OER/P), please contact James R. Paradiso at james.paradiso@ucf.edu.
