What are 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."

- William & Flora Hewlett Foundation

Open Educational Resources (OER) are gaining more ground in education, as the price of textbooks rise and students have trouble to meet them. Educators are now looking towards low-cost, but highly vetted and valuable resources for teaching, learning, and research purposes. Some important features of OER include:

• it can either be in the public domain, or under a more lax intellectual property license
• it can be revised, remixed, added upon, translated, and then shared again to meet different needs
• it can take many forms, such as: syllabi, lesson plans, videos, software, tests, teaching techniques, group activities, writing prompts, textbooks, learning modules, experiments, simulations, and coarse designs. There are no platform restraints.

Source: The Review Project

Six Steps to OER

Step 1: Set aside time

Searching for OER takes time and persistence just like research.

Step 2: Look at your current text

Is your current textbook available for free through the library databases?

Step 3: Locate your OER text

Check to see if a whole OER textbook already exists for your course.

Step 4: Browse open repositories

Browse several repositories to see what content is available.

Step 5: Supplement

Look at your learning objectives and find materials for different topics.

Step 6: Ask for help

Call a librarian to get help. You can do this anytime!

Impact

Want to learn more? Multiple studies on faculty implementations, misunderstandings, acceptance of, and evaluation of OER have been done. The Review Project has curated a number of empirical studies published in scholarly journals on this topic. Their general conclusion is:

" Once adopted, OER provide the permissions necessary for faculty to engage in a wide range of pedagogical innovations. In each of the studies reported above, OER were used in a manner very similar to the traditional textbooks they replaced. We look forward to reviewing empirical articles describing the learning impacts of open pedagogies."

7 Things You Should Know about Open Educational Resources

ACC Learn OER - a series of self-paced online learning modules. The nine modules can serve as an introduction to OER as well as an opportunity for further exploration and discovery of OER and open education practices.

Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER) - Community of Practice for Open Education. CCCOER is a growing consortium of community and technical colleges committed to expanding access to education and increasing student success through adoption of open educational policy, practices, and resources.

Free to Learn guide by Hal Plotkin

OER Mythbusting - SPARC and a team of librarians created this resource, OER Mythbusting, aimed at debunking seven of the most common OER myths.

Graphic by Megan Pritcher

Why should you use OER?

OER provides many benefits that many instructors find to not only be convenient but an improvement in many ways. It is:

Free and Legal to Use, Improve, and Share

• save precious time and energy by adapting or revising resources that have already been created
• tailor educational resources for your specific course content
• expands opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching and learning by allowing you to integrate and revise multiple educational resources
• redefine 'traditional" learning by incorporating multi-media and scenario-based education
• allows you to go beyond the limits and confines of "teaching to the book"

Network and Collaborate with Peers

• access educational resources that other experts in your field have peer reviewed already
• review or annotation features so other instructors have a more in-depth knowledge of the resource and its quality quickly
• collaborative platforms make learning and teaching a team project

Lower Educational Cost and Improve Access to Information

• reduce the cost of course materials (particularly textbooks!) for your students so they may have more access without extra financial burden
• instantly find and gain access to information on virtually any topic on various devices
• give learners the option of looking at course content openly before enrolling 
• reduce the load your students bear, possibly increasing graduation and retention rates