Open Educational Resources (OER)

Definition:

"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."

Source: The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. For more definitions of OER, view the Creative Commons Wiki.

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

Source: The Review Project

There are many reasons instructors might want to use OER:

Free and legal to use, improve and share

• Save time and energy by adapting or revising resources that have already been creating
• Tailoring educational resources to the specific content for your course
• Expands opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching and learning by allowing instructors to integrate and revise multiple educational resources
• Redefines "traditional" learning by often incorporating multi-media or scenario-based education
• Allows instructor to go beyond the confines of "teaching to the book"

Network and collaborate with peers

• Access to educational resources that have already been "peer-reviewed" by other experts in your field
• Many resources have a review or annotation feature so instructors have more in-depth knowledge of the resource and its quality quickly
• Makes learning and teaching more collaborative

Lower educational cost and improve access to information

• Reduces the cost of course materials, particularly textbooks so that all students have access and aren't as financially burdened
• Find and access information instantly on virtually any topic, and can access with various devices.
• Gives learners the option of looking at course content openly before enrolling.
• Can reduce the students bear, sometimes increasing graduation and retention rates

What's the same and what's different?

Note: This comparison chart was developed by Kate Hess from Kirkwood Community College Library's guide on open textbooks