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5Rs of OER Workflow

Run the 5Rs of OER Workflow MicroSim Fullscreen

About This MicroSim

This MicroSim visualizes David Wiley's 5Rs framework for Open Educational Resources (OER) — Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute — as a vertical Mermaid.js flowchart, starting from a licensed OER and building cumulatively toward full redistribution rights. A seventh node, styled with a dashed purple border, presents a proposed 6th R: Regenerate — the freedom to recreate an intelligent textbook from its underlying learning graph and reusable agentic skills, not just from its rendered chapters.

See the full discussion in the 5Rs of Intelligent Textbooks appendix.

How to Use

  • Hover over any step in the diagram to see a short, one-sentence tip in a floating tooltip.
  • Click a step to select it (highlighted with an amber border) and read a detailed narrative explanation in the right-hand panel.
  • The color key at the top of the right panel distinguishes the licensed OER starting point, Wiley's original 5Rs, and the proposed 6th R.

Iframe Embed Code

You can add this MicroSim to any web page by adding this to your HTML:

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<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/intelligent-textbooks/sims/five-rs-oer/main.html"
        height="802px"
        width="100%"
        scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Grade Level

Undergraduate, graduate, and professional development (instructional designers, OER authors, textbook publishers)

Duration

10-15 minutes

Prerequisites

General familiarity with copyright vs. open licensing (e.g. Creative Commons) is helpful but not required.

Activities

  1. Exploration (5 min): Click through each of the 5Rs in order and read the detailed narrative for each, noting the example given for each freedom.
  2. Guided Practice (5 min): Discuss why each R is described as building cumulatively on the one before it (e.g. why you can't Remix a resource you have no right to Revise).
  3. Assessment (5 min): Click Regenerate and discuss whether it should count as a true 6th R or as an implementation detail of the existing 5Rs.

Assessment

Ask learners to classify a real resource (e.g. a textbook PDF found online) against the 5Rs: which freedoms does its license actually grant?

References

  1. Wiley, D. (2014). The Access Compromise and the 5th R. Iterating Toward Openness.
  2. Wiley, D. Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources.
  3. Creative Commons. About CC Licenses.