Scholarly Communication and Open Access: Educators
Creative Commons
OER Links
Clearinghouses
College Open Textbooks Collaborative
University-Curated OER Collections
Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota Libraries)
OpenStax (Rice University)
Subject-Specific OER
American Institute of Mathematics
Noba (Psychology)
Smarthistory (Art History)
What are Open Educational Resources?
Open Educational Resources (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."*
OER allow users to:
- Retain – users have the right to make, archive, and own copies of the content
- Reuse – content can be reused in its unaltered form
- Revise – content can be adapted, adjusted, modified, and altered
- Remix – original or revised content can be combined with other content to create something new
- Redistribute – copies of the content can be shared with others in its original, revised or remixed form.**
*From The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
**5 Rs from David Wiley
Why OER?
According to the U.S. PIRG Education Fund and the Student PIRGS 2014 report, Fixing the Broken Textbook Market:
- 65% of students are deferring purchase of a textbook because of cost
- 94% of these students are concerned that not having the textbook would affect their grade
- 48% of students had decided against taking a course because of the cost of the textbook
If your textbook is online, you can start using it from the first day of class – no need to provide extra time for students to buy a copy.