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Open Educational Resources

This guide is to help promote and educate about open educational resources in higher education.

Open Educational Resources Header

What is OER? 

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

The following guide (The Five R's of Openness) are the necessary qualifications to make something OER. 

  • Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
  • Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
  • Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
  • Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
  • Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

 

What Does OER Look Like? 

OER can take many forms, such as syllabi, lesson plans, videos, software, tests, teaching techniques, group activities, writing prompts, textbooks, learning modules, experiments, simulations, and course designs. There are no platform restraints. 

In this guide, you will find links to platforms that have courseware, lectures, assignments, textbooks, images, and videos. 

Borrowed from the Scholarly Communications and Publishing OER research guide by Illinois Library 

Why Do Open Educational Resources Matter?
 

Textbook costs can be a major strain on our students, especially those who might already be struggling financially. Being able to save money on textbooks can allow students to succeed academically who might otherwise struggle. Students sometimes try to get by without the text, or by using a cheaper older edition that might have incorrect information. 

The most recent survey data from the College Board indicates a full-time undergraduate can incur at least $1,240 to pay for books and supplies during the 2019-2020 academic year (Zhao, Y., & Satyanarayana, A., & Cooney, C. 2020, November)

The article linked above breaks down the cost of textbooks and the importance of open educational resources. 

 

TedX Textbook Affordability

 

Additional Resources 

Frequently Asked Questions 

  • What is OER? 
    Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.
  • How does OER help educators and students? 
    Open educational resources give educators the ability to adapt instructional resources to the individual needs of their students, to ensure that resources are up to date, and to ensure that cost is not a barrier to accessing high-quality standards-aligned resources.
  • What is the difference between 'free and 'open' resources? 
    Open educational resources are and always will be free in digital form, but not all free resources are OER. Free resources may be temporarily free or may be restricted from use at some time in the future (including by the addition of fees to access those resources). Moreover, free resources which may not be modified, adapted or redistributed without express permissions from the copyright holder are not OER.
  • How do I know if an educational resource is an OER? 
    The key distinguishing characteristic of OER is its intellectual property license and the freedoms the license grants to others to share and adapt it. If a lesson plan or activity is not clearly tagged or marked as being in the public domain or having an open license, it is not OER. It’s that simple. While custom copyright licenses can be developed to facilitate the development and use of OER, often it can be easier to apply free-to-use standardized licenses developed specifically for that purpose, such as those developed by Creative Commons or – for software – those approved by the Open Source Initiative

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 International License. It was adapted from “#GoOpen: OER for K-12 Educators” (www.tinyurl.com/GoOpen) by Doug Levin, also available under a CC BY license