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. 

Learn more through a short course adapted by our team, just for you.

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

Images / Videos / Simulations 

Create Open and/or Free Educational Resources for Your Course(s)

Use the following tools to kickstart your content authoring experience. (Note: Click on the image/s below to get started.)

Pressbooks Logo

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)

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 barriers 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

Student Advocacy

Wiki Knights is a registered student organization at UCF focused on advocating for open educational resources (OER)—amplifying the voice of the UCF student community on textbook / course materials cost, use, and experience.. See their knightconnect page or their website to learn more.

“Word on the Street” – Wiki Knights, March 2023
“Students Thoughts on Textbooks” – Wiki Knights, November 2021

Impact

Estimated Student Savings

This measure reflects student savings resulting from open education efforts led through, associated with, or otherwise recorded by the Center for Distributed Learning (CDL).  
*Methodology: Narrative / EDA, data, source code 

  • Fall 2021 – Summer 2022 = $2,489,535(.66) [246 Sections / 21,289 Enrollments]
  • Fall 2020 – Summer 2021 = $1,984,939(.56) [173 Sections / 16,974 Enrollments]
  • Fall 2019 – Summer 2020 = $1,041,467(.64) [81 Sections / 8,906 Enrollments]

Scholarship (Presentations & Publications)

The following works were produced by or in collaboration with members of the Open Learning Team (OLT) at the Center for Distributed Learning (CDL).

Presentations

  • Saving Faculty Time, Saving Students Money [Slides / Flowchart] (Dubach & Paradiso, 2023)
  • Working Collaboratively to Support Faculty and Increase Student Access Through Open Educational Resources (OER) Development and Implementation [Slides] (Paradiso, Woodland, & Ramirez, 2022)
  • Making Impact through Open Educational Practices [Webinar / Slides] (Paradiso, 2021)

Publications

Contact

If you would like to learn more about Open Educational Resources and Practices (OER/P), please contact the AIM Program Coordinator for Open Education (Jim Paradiso) at james.paradiso@ucf.edu.  

“Open Educational Resources and Practices” by James R. Paradiso is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Champions of Open

Interested in how your fellow colleagues have incorporated open educational resources and practices into their teaching? View the stories below for some example projects. 

UCF Pressbooks

UCF has partnered with Pressbooks to provide faculty and students an authoring tool with which they can publish portable, interactive web content for a variety of use-cases.  Cost Pressbooks is free-of-cost to all UCF faculty, staff, and students. Key Features Streamlined authoring / ‘Quick Start’: Add your textual, audio, and video content through an easy-to-use interface or import your pre-existing content from Microsoft Word, Webcourses’ Pages, and more …

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