Open Educational Resources (OER): Introduction to OER

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. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation).

OER include:

• full courses,
• course materials,
• modules,
• textbooks,
• streaming videos,
• tests,
• software,
• and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

Open access materials consist of materials that are available to the public such as journal articles whose copyright have expired. Open educational materials are resources such a articles that can be reused, remixed, revised and redistributed with a copyright license.

Examples of open access( OA) include articles, theses, conference proceedings, and videos.

Examples of open educational resources include textbooks, course material and full course modules, videos, tests, software and open access journals.

The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education.

This shift in educational practice is not just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensed content; it’s about participation and co-creation. Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning content through engaging educators in new participatory processes and effective technologies for engaging with learning (https://oercommons.org/about).

Types of Licenses

OPEN - free to share adapt or modify

FREE - free to access; not necessarily allowed to share, adapt or modify

FAIR USE - permits limited use of material for educational purposes without acquiring permission from the copyright holder

PUBLIC DOMAIN - works that are publicly available because intellectual property rights have expired or have been forfeited

PAY - faculty adopts a book from a traditional publisher; students pay for textbooks 

source: creativecommons.org

The 5 Rs of OER

Retain - the right to maintain your own copies of a work

Reuse - the right to use a work in multiple different ways (in a class, on a website, in a paper)

Revise - the right to modify the work to suit your needs

Remix - the right to combine the work with other content

Redistribute - the right to share copies of the work (including any revisions or remixing you may have done)

Adapted from creativecommons.org.