Electronic Resources & Metadata Librarian
License
Open Access and Open Education Resources by Mike Bloomberg is licensed under CC BY 4.0
What are OER?
OER, or Open Educational Resources, are "teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost, and without needing to ask permission" (OER Commons). Most often, these will take the form of materials that have been openly licensed, usually with a Creative Commons license, which means that their creators have allowed reuse of their works under some conditions.
Specifically, openly licensed works allow for these five freedoms, commonly called the 'five Rs':
- Retain. Users can "make, own, and control copies" of openly-licensed materials.
- Reuse. Users can use content in many different contexts, such as on a website or in a video.
- Revise. Users can adapt or modified openly-licensed materials for their own needs.
- Remix. Users can combine openly-licensed materials with other materials to create new works.
- Redistribute. Users can share copies of openly-licensed materials, as well as their revisions or remixes.
These five freedoms offer many advantages in the classroom.
Recommended reading:
The OER Starter Kit by Publication Date: 2019This starter kit has been created to provide instructors with an introduction to the use and creation of open educational resources (OER). The text is broken into five sections: Getting Started, Copyright, Finding OER, Teaching with OER, and Creating OER. Although some chapters contain more advanced content, the starter kit is primarily intended for users who are entirely new to Open Education.
Why use OER?
There are so many reasons to adopt OER in your classroom!
- Student success. Textbook costs have a significant impact on students. Providing a free, online textbook reduces the need for students to delay purchasing texts; drop a course due to textbook costs; or attempt to get through the course without the textbook.
- Pedagogy. The ability to revise and remix texts gives instructors freedom to customize course content according to student needs.
- Accessibility. OER are accessible options in many ways. Most options are online and friendly to assistive technology; the library would be happy to work with the CLASS office to conduct an accessibility audit of any OER you are considering. Additionally, any improvements that you make to a textbook to improve its accessibility can be shared with the entire OER community because of the built-in permissions to revise, remix, and redistribute OER.
Open pedagogy
As you explore OER, you may wish to apply the principles of open education to more than just your textbook through open pedagogy, which is "the practice of engaging with students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it" (thanks to the University of Texas at Arlington for that definition!). Using the Five Rs, students can create and adapt information even as they learn it.
- Open Pedagogy NotebookCheck out the OPN for examples of assignments that have students create learning objects that others can use to further their own education.
- Open Pedagogy PortalA database of case studies, student work product, and other resources to help you learn about Open Pedagogy.
OER repositories
These databases contain material from many different OER producers.
- OER CommonsA digital library and a collaboration platform, this platform contains materials beyond just textbooks (think assignments, lecture notes, and assessments) and allows searchers to filter by their students' education level, education standards, and language.
- Mason OER MetafinderThis platform performs one search simultaneously across 22 different sources of OER, making it very good for finding OER for a niche area of study. You can restrict your search to OER-specific sites, or you can search other openly-licensed materials from places like the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and Project Gutenberg.
Don't forget that Open Access journal articles can also be used as Open Education Resources - provided the license of the article allows the "5Rs".