This document provides guidance for a workshop on exploring and using Open Educational Resources (OER). The workshop aims to introduce OER through a practical task where participants will work in teams to create teaching/learning sessions incorporating existing OER. The session includes an introductory period, time for participants to work on their tasks, and for teams to present their findings. The task involves selecting an engineering topic and developing an outline for a teaching session or assessment that reuses available OER. The document provides information on finding, assessing, and complying with licensing of OER materials.

1. OER Workshop Handout
Brief
• To explore the availability of OER
• To investigate how to re use OER within your own materials.
How OER is found, assessed and used are the main outcomes from this workshop.
The session will consist of:
– 10 minutes intro/ settling down/ team creation/ task description/ questions,
– 45 task activity
– 30 minutes for teams to present their findings to the room.
– feedback/ q&a.
The object of this session is to introduce Open Educational Resources to delegates in a practical manner by tasking
them with creating a teaching/learning session. By asking delegates to interact with the available resources, finding,
assessing and then using them, many of the factors encountered during the Open Engineering Resources Pilot
(OERP) Project will be mirrored. This session will provide delegates with the opportunity to explore OER learning how
to find and use existing resources with the assistance of OERP project partners.
By experimenting within this setting the delegates should be encouraged to use the outputs from the session in their
teaching going forward. This will then facilitate the increased uptake of OER within engineering and eventually
encourage delegate attendees to consider releasing their materials as OER in the future.
Task
To create an outline of one or more teaching, tutorial, coursework or assessment sessions on
– Electric Circuits
– Dynamics
– Structures
– Thermodynamics
– Strength of Materials
– Engineering Design
Incorporating existing OER where possible.
How you teach, what you teach is entirely up to you.
– Try to create an outline for one teaching session and one tutorial, or coursework or assessment,
however if you want to do things differently feel free to do so.
– Try to tailor the sessions to suit the level of resources available. You may want to set the level at 1st
year undergraduates rather than postgrad. as the resources to utilise may not be available.
The teaching/learning session can take any form the teams of delegates see fit as the most important element is the
interaction and experience of OER.
You need to decide what you want to teach/assess in the session(s) and create resources that suit your needs. The
resource you create during the allotted time should be a skeleton of the session including either links to, a section of,
or whole resources you want to re use in this session.
Use the PowerPoint template to present your session to the class. Feel free to edit the template as you see fit,
add/delete slides, but try to answer the points made.
Pay special attention to the licence details of the resource and try to follow the guidance.
© Loughborough University 2010. This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

2. Licences to look for:
OER relies primarily on the use of open licences such as Creative Commons www.creativecommons.org. However
there are other licences such as GNU which may be applied to OER so always be careful when looking to reuse OER.
If there are no licence details clearly attached to any given resource check the source for confirmation. Look in the
‘Terms and Conditions’, ‘Statement of Use’ or in the ‘Terms of Use’ section of the host website to see what you are
allowed to do with a resource. If nothing is said- assume you need to ask permission.
CC is definitely the most commonly occurring with OER and there are 6 types of CC licence.
This licence lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially,
as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licences
offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.
This licence lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit
you and licence their new creations under the identical terms. This licence is often compared to open source software
licences. All new works based on yours will carry the same licence, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.
This licence allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in
whole, with credit to the author.
This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-
commercially, although their new works must also acknowledge you and
be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit the author
and license derivative works under the identical terms. All new work based on that which holds this licence will then
carry the same licence, so all derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.
This licence is the most restrictive of the six. This licence is often called the “free advertising” licence because it
allows others to download works and share them as long as they mention the author and link back to them. Works
produced under this licence cannot be changed or used commercially in any way.
Definitions of the licences used under CC Attribution 3.0. Provided by Creative Commons, available at www.creativecommons.org.
Courtesy of Core Materials http://core.materials.ac.uk/docs/releasing_oers.pdf.
NB. Ensure that what you use complies with the terms of the licence it is released under.
Everything online is owned by someone, unless there is a statement saying it is released into the ‘Public
Domain’.
Where these licences are applied you must follow the terms. In effect CC licences say what you can do with the item-
i.e.
CC-By reuse by with an acknowledgement for the original owner and the source.
CC-BY-SA as above but must be released under the same licence.
CC-BY-NC as CC-By but no commercial use.
CC-BY-NC-SA combination of all above.
CC-BY-ND means you can use the original but not create edited versions of it.
CC-BY-ND-NC no secondary versions and no commercial uses.
Useful Websites for Resources
www.oercommons.org - all should be OER.
www.slideshare.net - can filter by licence.
www.scribd.com - check resource for permissions.
www.jorum.ac.uk - all resources under JorumOPEN should be CC licensed*.
www.google.co.uk - advanced search; select licence type.
www.cnx.org - all resources should be OER.
www.flickr.com - advanced search; select licence type.
www.openlearn.open.ac.uk - all should be OER.
www.merlot.org – online OER repository.

3. Check to ensure resources are correctly licensed for reuse. It there is no mention of licence or CC details, look for
‘terms of use’ section or something similar.
#
All resources tagged with UKOER will appear in JorumOPEN so you may have some duplication.
Tags to use for searching:
a selection of examples where resources can be found using the following
 General – engineering, UKOER, CC, civil engineering, materials, structures, forces, OCW, MIT
 Electric Circuits – electronics, voltage, conductors, capacitors,
 Dynamics – responses, 1st/2nd order, resonance, dynamics, dampening, rigid bodies
 Structures – forces, materials, loads, Poisson.
 Thermodynamics – heat, temperature, conduction, energy, Celsius
 Strength of Materials – shear, strain, forces, torsion, compression, fracture, fatigue, ductile, brittle, loads, loading,
Poisson.
 Engineering Design – performance, function, brief, task, function
You know the subject, think of words that may be contained within resources that will help you surface materials to
help with the task. We have searched for these keywords above so we know there are some resources available
under these terms. (These are the keywords, tags or metadata that you would add to resources so that they are
surfaced by students and colleagues alike in searching.)