OER: Open Educational Resources: Home

Open Educational Resources (OER)...

1. Improve access! They are free and available to anyone.
2. Prioritize equal access and inclusion! They make education and educational materials accessible and affordable. Textbooks are expensive, which may require students to choose between a book or paying the bills. OER means students don't have to choose--they can participate and access content without financial barriers.
3. Save money! For you, your students, other professors, teachers, and instructors.
4. Are reusable! And, generally offered with Creative Commons licenses that allow the content to be freely reused and remixed with attribution to the original author. This means that you can take a great resource and tweak it to fit your class's needs. 

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others." --Creative Commons 

Users of OER are allowed to engage in the 5Rs:

Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Image adapted from Getting Started with OER by Jillian Maynard and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License