What is OER?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly via the Internet for anyone to use. OER can be remixed, revised, reused, retained, and redistributed (known as the 5 R's).
Open Educational Resources include:
Learning content: full courses, course material, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
Tools: software to support the creation, delivery, use, and customization of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and online learning communities.
Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.
Why use OER?
OER provides an equity-minded alternative to the rising costs of education and textbooks. OER increases access to education, creates a community of collaboration for educators to contribute to and benefit from, and includes incredibly high-quality materials that can be adjusted and updated year to year without asking students to shoulder the cost of each new textbook edition, which sometimes includes only minor changes. Flexibility is a key concept in OER. Materials can be adapted for your specific needs. Many educators use OER as a way to get students more involved and show studentsthe larger context of learning and sharing knowledge beyond the four walls of a classroom.
Using Open Educational Resources can:
Relieve financial burden to students: The cost of textbooks has added a tremendous financial burden to students around the world. A 2020 study by Student PIRGSLinks to an external site. found that 63% of students in the United States reported not buying or renting a textbook because of cost. According to Education Data Initative, the average students takes on $30,000 of student debt to pursue a 4-year degree. If even half of their courses used OER, imagine the benefits to graduates entering the job market.
Improve pedagogical outcomes: A number of studies show that OER can help improve pedagogical outcomes, such as students' final grades, as well as their withdrawal and fail rates. For instance, a 2018 study of more than 21,000 studentsLinks to an external site. in Georgia found that students in a class using OER were more likely to earn a B+ or better, and that they were 2.68% less likely to fail or withdraw from the class. These outcomes were even larger for students of color and on the Pell Grant.
Simplify navigation and use: Students frequently comment on how convenient it is to have all of their readings linked and available online.
Excellent Available Options: There are so many easy options available (see below). You may be surprised to learn that some OERs are even better options than what you may already use in your course.
Inspiration and Reuse: Because OER are licensed for reuse, you can adapt and change the material to best fit the needs of your course, preventing the need for you to completely overhaul your course when you update your textbook.
Freedom and Choice: You are the author of your own course's materials. You can find your materials chapter by chapter to build your own customized textbook, you can find a whoel OER textbook that you love from cover to cover, and you can even go text-free and use OER videos, activities, and other materials to present your content in innovative ways.
Understanding Licensing, Copyright, and Fair Use
OER are free to use, but many do require attribution if they are remixed or edited. It's important to understand how they can be licensed for your use, and how to tell. Because most OERs are under terms of Creative Commons licensing, understanding CC will help you to use OERs better. These licenses allow the creator to give permission for use beyond the normal copyright.
The Fair Use Doctrine allows reproduction and other uses of copyrighted works without requiring permission from the copyright owner under certain conditions. In many cases, you can use copyrighted materials for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research. The fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law lists the following factors to be evaluated in determining whether a particular use of a copyrighted work is a permitted fair use:
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| The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
| Uses in nonprofit educational institutions are more likely to be fair use than works used for commercial purposes, but not all educational uses are fair use
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| The nature of the copyrighted work
| Reproducing a factual work is more likely to be fair use than a creative, artistic work such as a musical composition
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| The amount and significance of the portion used in relation to the entire work
| Reproducing smaller portions of a work is more likely to be fair use than larger portions
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| The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
| Uses which have no or little market impact on the copyrighted work are more likely to be fair than those that interfere with potential markets
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If this all seems overwhelming (it's a lot), plan to provide links whenever you can. Many resources you want your students to read or view are already available online on the web or through the OER library’s catalog and databases. You can simply provide links to such resources, and avoid the copyright implications of making copies or distributing materials yourself.
For news articles, blog posts, and other materials on the open web, links should be easy to find. Video content may be available on popular streaming services, and your students may already have access to them through those platforms. Books and articles may be available online through library subscriptions. You can provide yourn students students with a link directly to something the library subscribes to and they will be able to access it using their COS login credentials.
OER Collections
The nature of OER is that new materials are constantly being written, adapted, and introduced. The following is a far-from-exhaustive collection of OER libraries that span many areas, content-types, and disciplines. Please reach out to the DE Coordinator if you would like support in navigating or implementing content found in any of these libraries. COS has a goal of creating as many zero-cost pathways as possible for our students, and every course is an important step in that pursuit.
View the list of Discipline Leads
Are you interested in ensuring you are aware of work related to your discipline or disciplines that the OERI and/or the ASCCC is doing? If so, be sure to sign up for your discipline listserv – and the ASCCC OERI’s listserv.
