LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: Home

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible teaching, learning, and research materials in any format that are in the public domain or are available under an open license that allows their free use and re-purposing by others.

The term open educational resources (OER) was first introduced at a conference hosted by UNESCO in 2000 and was endorsed in the context of providing free access to educational resources on a global scale.

OER include a varied range of materials: books, case studies, courses, journals, primary sources, assessments, assignments, reference materials, tutorials, tests, and more.

Users can:

The 5 R's - Source http://opencontent.org/definition/

Use OER to provide an affordable, accessible, and engaging learning experience.

... Access, Equity and Pedagogy

Benefits:

Students, staff and everyone anywhere can access OER at any time for free
OERs can supplement textbooks and lectures where deficiencies in information are apparent
OER has demonstrated an increase in student learning while removing barriers of accessibility and affordability
Develop digital literacies
Open for addressing diversity and inclusion
Persistent availability of resources
Academics/users can customize/adapt to their context/needs
Fast availability of material may increase the timeliness and relevance of the material being presented
Reduces inequality to education - supports Sustainable Development Goal 4

Challenges in using OER

Quality Assurance

OER release should be subject to ongoing Quality Assurance process which is transparent and fair, however this is not always the case.

Sustainability

Without preservation of these often one-time start-up OER projects, the initial funding will end after a few years and sustaining the resources will be expensive, the resources may become outdated and the quality gone.

Lack of understanding about OER

Many do not understand the potential of OER and feel that it threatens their ownership of intellectual property. Also, it takes time to creat and/or locate existing OER.

Search tools that make the discovery of open content easier:

► Maryland Open Source Textbook (MOST) Commons - an online space designed to support faculty and staff in discovering materials, collaborating with colleagues, and contributing OER to improve curricula.

► Mason OER Metafinder - performs a simultaneous search across 21 different sources of open educational materials.

► OASIS - Openly Available Sources Integrated Search - searches open content from 72 different sources

Useful Resources

Faculty OER Toolkit
Open Education Handbook
The OER Starter Kit
SPARC - promotes Open Access to scholarly articles, the open sharing of research data, and the creation and adoption of Open Educational Resources.
UNESCO OER Recommendation
Wikimedia - a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world.

Finding Open Images

Creative Commons Image Search - browse over 500 million images, available for reuse.
Flicker Commons - online photo management app
Unsplash - The internet’s source of freely-usable images
Wikimedia Commons - freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute

Resources to get you started

Use OER instead of commercial textbooks if it’s pedagogically fitting.

Using OER and OEP for Teaching and Learning

OER TOOLKIT

The toolkit provides information and tools to understand, engage with, and sustain OER in practice.

There is no central repository for OER, here's some key resources:

Use open technologies to facilitate, evaluate, and create open educational resources to share.

Checkout your subject or discipline:

Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum using this public digital library of open educational resources.

862 Open Textbooks

Textbooks in the Open Textbook Library are considered open because they are free to use and distribute, and are licensed to be freely adapted or changed with proper attribution.

Open Library contains information about books. Internet Archive hosts a collection of digitized books. Open Library’s universal catalog provides links to discover, borrow, and read from the Internet Archive’s collections.