Open & Affordable Educational Resources Guide

What Are OER?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and research materials--such as courses, lectures, syllabi, lesson plans, tutorials, ancillary resources, and, above all, textbooks--that are free of most or all cost and copyright barriers. This means they are usually either in the public domain or openly licensed. As such, OER can be shared widely and used by others in the following ways:

1. Retain (make and control copies of the resource)
2. Reuse (use the resource as they wish)
3. Revise (adapt or modify the resource)
4. Remix (combine the material to create a new resource)
5. Redistribute (share the resource with others)

These rights are known as the “Five R” permissions.

In short, OER are affordable and more often free, and they can be modified to create a customized educational resource. 

Why Create / Use OER?

Because OERs are largely free from barriers of use, OERs facilitate the ideals of economic justice and social justice and their goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion by leveling the playing field between those who can afford access to educational materials and those who can’t. OERs broaden access to education, making education less exclusive and enabling persons who would otherwise be excluded to achieve its benefits.

What Are Open Textbooks?

Open textbooks are textbooks that are openly licensed, so they are 1) free of charge in their digital format and very low cost in a printed-and-bound format, and they 2) offer the “Five R” permissions, so they can be revised and customized for your specific needs.

Moreover, open textbooks:

• are often equal in quality to commercial versions

  • many open textbooks are peer reviewed (see, for instance, those by OpenStax)

• cover nearly every academic discipline

  • open textbooks cover nearly every subject and are particularly strong and deep in high-enrollment, introductory courses

• are permanent, so they can be referred to after the class ends 

  •  rental textbooks must be returned at the end of the class

• are available immediately, so students can have them at the start of the class

  • textbooks ordered from external vendors often have long shipping times

• sometimes include ancillary materials, such as homework, quizzes, and tests

What Are OER Beyond Textbooks?

OER also include: 

• open courses
  • MIT OpenCourseWare, Open Yale Courses; Harvard Online Courses; edX, etc.
• open lectures (videos, podcasts, slides, etc.) 
  • Open Oxford Podcasts; Academic Earth; Professor Lauren Woolsey's (Grand Rapids Community College) Astronomy and Physics Lectures, Professor Miriam Posner (UCLA, Information Studies), UCSB "Getting Started with Text Analysis," etc.
• open and open-to-campus syllabi
  • Harvard, Cornell, U Wisconsin History Department, Professor Ryan Cordell (Northeastern, English), etc. 
• open tutorials
  • Programming Historian; Hacking the Humanities; U Idaho Library digital scholarship workshops, etc.
• open lesson plans 
  • #DLFteach Toolkit: Lesson Plans for Digital Library Instruction, OER Commons lesson plans, etc.
• open ancillary resources (interactive assignments / assessments, simulations, etc.)
  • LibreTexts (mainly STEM), MyOpenMath, PHeT Interactive Simulations (Science and Math), Project CORA (Librarians), etc.
• And more!

Why Share These Educational Resources?

Sharing pedagogical materials such as these facilitates and improves teaching and learning.

• Recording and sharing lectures, like openly publishing tutorials, broadens education by enabling those outside the class to enter and learn from it.
• Publishing syllabi on the web, likewise, helps students choose classes and provides those who cannot take the class with curated and directed reading lists, which can help them identify what to read.
• Shared lesson plans, classroom activities, and learning assessments and assignments can help teachers improve their teaching and better plan their own classes.

"An Introduction to Open Educational Resources" by Abbey K. Elder is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International license and has not been modified.