What is OER?

OER stands for Open Educational Resources—Educational resources, materials, textbooks, videos, homework assignments. Can also be your syllabus, which carries an open license usually from creative commons. Open license is significant because it does not change the copyright but allows people to use your material in ways that you.

Most open licenses come with what is referred to as the five Rs:

Retain: Students or anyone else using your material forever unlike a rental or limited use material they can download it, print it or save it for future use.

Reuse and Redistribute:  this allows you or whoever you share the materials with as much as they want as long as they want.

Revise and Remix:  this allows us to customize materials to fit our course and students’ needs.

The purpose of OER is to drive down the cost of a college education. There is a positive correlation between student success and using OER.

According to Marisa Petrich in her book Building Infrastructure for Open Educational Resources at UW Tacoma,

• "Free materials serve a meaningful purpose in education by providing tools to support teaching and learning, but free resources are not necessarily open resources.
• “Free” means that there is no required cost to access materials. It does not mean that users may also reuse, modify, or share the materials."
• "When a resource is open, users know they can reuse and share the resource widely, so long as they abide by the terms of the creator. Open materials also allow users to revise and remix them with other open resources or self-generated content to produce new material. These terms and permissions are typically established in the work’s license."