Before thinking about Open Educational Resources (OER), the very first thing to notify is the difference between Openly Licensed Educational Content and Online Educational Content. The two concepts can be confusing, but the two have clearly different definitions.
Openly Licensed Educational Content is educational resources that are free to use, reuse, modify and share with others. Also, it is not necessarily digital. On the other hand, Online Educational Content is completely digital resources such as videos, audios, images, and texts. Online Educational Content is not always free, which is a big difference from Openly Licensed Educational Content. Educational videos on Youtube are good examples of Online Educational Content. They are usually free, but there are contents that require payments to watch the video. Youtube lets users buy or rent movies and shows. These can be Online Educational Contents but not Openly Licensed Educational Contents.
Free Youtube (Openly Licensed Educational Content AND Online Educational Content)
vs. Not-Free Youtube Movies(Online Educational Content)
The Youtube video below is an example of OER that is both Openly Licensed Educational Content and Online Educational Content.
Source: Polyphonic.
This source created by Polyphonic, a Youtube merchandiser who creates video essays about music and other aspects of pop culture. The information covered in this content is sort of an introduction or guidance to the importance of a legendary rock band’s drummer, John Bonham. Assuming the potential class objectives could also be a musical interpretation of John Bonham’s drumming or introduction to essential rock drumming skills, this video can directly address one or more of the class objectives. Even though there are no ways to check if the materials are peer-reviewed, the information covered in this video compiles and summarizes common assessments for John Bonham’s capability as a drummer. There are no spelling errors or typos. The layout and interface are very easy to follow. The video immediately lets the audience listen to the parts of John Bonham’s play accordingly while explaining the musical interpretation of his plays in dialogue. The background music draws interest from the audience to dive into this great drummer’s plays. The information is easily understandable, even though it is doubtful that someone who has no knowledge of reading musical notes would understand the content of this video fully. The description regarding the complexity of rhythm requires basic knowledge of music theories. The video shows all its materials on black background in the dark theme, which easily spotlights the materials and enhances learning. The video quality is 1080p, which is high, and audio was recorded professionally with decent clarity. Also, it is formatted as online streaming and is not available for different formats. The video provides various subtitle options, which are French, Italian, Japanese, English(auto-generated), Portuguese and Spanish so that a wide range of audiences could learn the content. It does not directly encourage audiences to participate or test their understandings and I don’t have any means to add any features to the video that could encourage the audiences’ learning activity. The license of this video completely open and fully allows educational reuse of the materials. Therefore, I could modify the materials by adding embedded quizzes or further materials to test the viewers’ level of understanding and enhance their learning experience by encouraging their participation. For example, an audience could search for musical interpretation for another rock drummer’s plays or be curious about John Bonham’s personal life stories. Attaching additional content related to this video’s learning objective could greatly enhance the development of the original learning objective into a bigger learning experience.
Personally, I was really inspired to use OER in my professional work because a part of my work is to find a public, free source of information. I build and manage a database regarding corporate mergers & acquisitions and asset acquisitions & divestitures in the energy market, and since our work is regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission we should always link our data to legit and free sources. I could use the same technique to find OER for our data compliance and integrity.