What is an OER

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)? 

Whether you're completely new to OER or have some experience, there is always more to learn! In order to conquer the more complex areas of OER you need to have a firm foundation about exactly what makes a resource “open.” If you plan to use OER in your course you will need to be able to easily identify open materials as well as other materials you can use in certain contexts. 

For a quick introduction, watch the following video:What is OER.
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OER Defined

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost, and without needing to ask permission. Unlike copyrighted resources, OER have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights.

In some cases, that means you can download a resource and share it with colleagues and students. In other cases, you may be able to download a resource, edit it in some way, and then re-post it as a remixed work. How do you know your options? OER often have a Creative Commons license that tells you how the material may be used, reused, adapted, and shared. In a later unit, we'll look a Creative Commons licenses more in depth.

More definitions of OER.

The 5 Rs of Open

The terms "open content" and "open educational resources" describe any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms like "open source") that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:

  1. Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
  2. Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
  3. Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
  4. Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
  5. Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Attributions: 

Video: What is OER? By The Council of Chief State School Officers, CC BY 4.0

Adapted from OER Commons & Open Education, Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License

5Rs: This material is based on original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition