Northwest Open XR Initiative Open Education Resources Submission Guidelines
Overview
This outlines the guidelines for authors submitting open education resources to the Northwest Open XR Initiative group.
About the Northwest Open XR Initiative
The Northwest Open XR Initiative (NWXR) project at Bellevue College serves as a resource for higher education institutions, especially community and technical colleges in the Pacific Northwest and beyond, funded by a National Science Foundation grant. Our goal is to create XR curricular resources for educators and learners in the creation of an open-access XR educational archive to disseminate resources and models regionally and nationally. The open education resources (OER) here consist of our work at Bellevue College, and the work of connected institution projects that are funded through our grant to produce OER aligned with our goals. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2329587
About These Guidelines
These guidelines have been written to help ensure that all OER that are submitted to the NWXR archive reach a range of standards relating to their potential benefit, currency, ease of use and level of professionalism, as well as ensuring that submissions to this group have the greatest possible potential to be approved by the OER Commons review team.
About Extended Reality (XR) Technologies
For the purposes of this guide, extended reality (XR) technologies are defined as immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 360° video and online virtual worlds. For our purposes, these technologies should be considered to be broadly defined. Other terms, such as mixed reality and spatial computing are synonymous with augmented reality under a broad definition.
Minimum Standards
All OER that will be published to the NWXR archive will adhere to the following minimum standards:
The resource satisfies all of the required conditions in the OER Commons Submission Guidelines.
The resource will be released under a Creative Commons license (and the authors have the right to assign such a license).
The resource focuses on material that relates to XR technologies and their application to education.
Recommended Standards
In addition to the above minimum standards, we also encourage submitting authors to aim to also meet the following recommended standards:
The resource satisfies all of the suggested conditions in the OER Commons Submission Guidelines.
Additional Resources
The following additional resources are likely to be helpful, particularly as you work on publishing your first few projects:
Types of OER Deliverables We Accept
Types of OER Deliverables We Accept*
Prototypes & Interactives
These are materials that will often have come out of our network and class activities, where educators and students have created XR applications that can be used to teach specific things within a class context. These will often be prototypes or vertical slices and will often require access to a VR headset, phone, or tablet to use.
Workshops
These are materials to enable the delivery of a workshop (usually 1-3 hours of in-class delivery). These materials would include a slide deck, instructions for how to run the lesson and potentially some resources for direct distribution to students (such as worksheets).
Application Guides/Primers
Short 1-2 page guides that introduce particular XR applications that can be used in an educational context. Rather than writing lessons, these would be more like a starting point from which lessons could be developed. Each guide would provide some high-level summary information about an XR application with education potential, along with some ideas for how it might be used in an educational context.
Professional Development Materials
Resources that have been designed for teachers to use for their own professional development, rather than being used directly in work with students. This might include overviews of various XR applications and how they are used, as well as discussing pros and cons of different tools in an educational context.
Full Courses
These are full courses that can be downloaded as packs for Canvas and other learning management systems and will enable institutions to run/remix the course as a whole. We don't anticipate doing a lot of these, but there might be 1-2 that come together.
*This list is intended to encourage our community of XR educators to think about the types of materials that other educators will find useful. It is not an exhaustive list, so you can also consult the OER Commons Material Types list for other types of materials that can be published as OERs.
How to Contact the NWXR Team
If you have suggestions for how to improve these guidelines, or if you have questions for the project team, you can contact us by sending an email to xrlab [at] bellevuecollege.edu.