OERs: Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are educational materials that are free to use, openly licensed and publicly accessible.  They have preassigned licenses which grant special permissions, these licenses allow you to use the resources without requiring you to ask the creator for direct permission.  OERs are available to everyone with little or no restrictions and they contain many different types of materials including: textbooks, articles, videos, lesson plans, syllabi and many other educational materials.

Why are using Open Educational Resources in instruction important and what are the benefits?

• The use of OERs decrease the financial burden on students as they are freely available.  This helps prevent the purchase of expensive textbooks.
• Students will have immediate access to their learning materials on the first day of classes.
• Faculty have greater control over their course content and are able to easily adapt that content to their needs, saving themselves time by using resources that have already been created.
• OERs increase collaboration opportunities for instructors as they create/revise teaching resources.

What makes OERs unique? 

Answer: the 5R activities

Retain:

• OERs allow people to make, own, and control copies of the resources that they find.  In other words, you may download and keep a copy for free.

Revise:

• Revision means that you may take your copy of the resource and edit, adapt or modify without asking the creator of the resource for permission.

Remix:

• Remix, or mashup, allows you to combine either complete resources or bits and pieces of resources together to create something entirely new that meets your specific needs.

Reuse:

• Reuse allows you to take the resource that you have (this could be an original, revised, or remixed version) and use it publicly such as in a class, conference presentation, or on a website.

Redistribute:

• Redistribution means that you may share copies (original, revised, or remixed) with others, allowing each student in your class or each attendee at the conference to have their own copy of the resource.

This material is based on original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.

Open Educational Resource (OERs) by Jess King, MLIS is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.