Open educational resources are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.
From Creative Commons
An OER is licensed such that it gives users permission to:
From David Wiley
Open Education Fact Sheet by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
A Faculty Perspective on Open Textbooks by Prof. Rajiv Jhangiani
2017 Babson Survey on the State of OER in U.S. Higher Ed. commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
OER Stories from faculty at Washington State Community and Technical Colleges
|Low- or no-cost||Cost to create and maintain|
|Remixable||Lack of ancillary materials|
|Available on demand||Lack of incentive to create/maintain|
|Not available for every subject/topic|
There are various sources of open textbooks, and you can find some of them listed on our guide to OER.
For this workshop, we will focus on the Open Textbook Library.
If you want to add a book you've written to the Open Textbook Library, or if you know of a book that you think should be add, see the library's criteria for inclusion for new open textbooks.
Creative Commons licenses provide a standardized way for authors and creators to grant the public permission to share and use their creative works. Creative Commons licenses mix and match the following elements:
Give credit to the original author
|Share Alike (SA)
Distribute derivative works under the same license
Only use the work for noncommercial purposes
|No Derivatives (ND)
Only use verbatim copies of the work
In addition to the usual criteria you apply when examining course materials for use in your courses, when reviewing open textbooks you may want to consider the following in your evaluation:
The ALMS Analysis (David Wiley)
The Open Textbook Library has its own set of criteria for evaluating their open textbooks.
Some of the content and the layout of this guide come from Cailean Cooney's "Open Educational Resources (OER)" guide for Ursula C. Schwerin Library New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York, which was available through the LibGuides Community, and used with permission.