Open educational resources are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.
From Creative Commons
An OER is licensed such that it gives users permission to:
From David Wiley
Open Education Fact Sheet by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
A Faculty Perspective on Open Textbooks by Prof. Rajiv Jhangiani
2017 Babson Survey on the State of OER in U.S. Higher Ed. commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
OER Stories from faculty at Washington State Community and Technical Colleges
Creative Commons licenses provide a standardized way for authors and creators to grant the public permission to share and use their creative works. Creative Commons licenses mix and match the following elements:
Give credit to the original author
|Share Alike (SA)
Distribute derivative works under the same license
Only use the work for noncommercial purposes
|No Derivatives (ND)
Only use verbatim copies of the work
One aspect of OER is that they are openly accessible. They are made freely available for users to access. However, they are not licensed in a fully open way. The article below provides useful information about Open Access.
|Low- or no-cost||Cost to create|
|Easily modified||Technology issues|
|Scalable||Lack of incentive to create/maintain|
|Available on demand||Discoverability|
|OpenStax||Pixabay||MIT Open Courseware||OER Commons|
|Open Textbook Library||NYPL Public Domain Collections||OER Commons Collect||MERLOT|
|Search WorldCat||CC Search|
|Mason OER Metafinder|
This is just a small sampling of the available OER sources. For a more comprehensive list see our OER guide.
In addition to the usual criteria you apply when examining course materials for use in your courses, OER will require that you consider the following in your evaluation:
The ALMS Analysis (David Wiley)
Some of the content and the layout of this guide come from Cailean Cooney's "Open Educational Resources (OER)" guide for Ursula C. Schwerin Library New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York, which was available through the LibGuides Community.