Open Educational Resources
Why Use OER?
OER are about more than free or low cost textbooks and course materials (though that is nothing to sneeze at). OER give faculty access to free, customizable learning materials, tools for better student engagement, and opportunities to learn and share with a far-reaching community of educators. For students, in addition to the potential cost savings, OER provide supplementary resources to enhance the educational experience and extend learning beyond the classroom.
What is Open Licensing?
Open Licensing takes the guesswork out of using copyright protected materials in the classroom. An open license is a document that works within the copyright framework to grant certain permissions to the public that would otherwise be restricted under normal copyright. The more “open” licenses allow users to access, modify and distribute a work with few or no restrictions.
For OER, the most typical type of open license is the Creative Commons license.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Their free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — under conditions of your choice. CC licenses let you easily change your copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.” (Definition from Creativecommons.org)
Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)
Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND)
Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC)
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)
The above text by Creative Commons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. To learn more about these licenses and the rationale behind them, please read About the Licenses by Creative Commons.
Resources
Finding the perfect resource from among so many sources can be a bit overwhelming. Below is a list (by no means comprehensive) of some places to get you started. If you are interested in employing OER in your classroom, you may also contact the Electronic Learning for some help in guiding you down the path.
This section focuses on textbooks released under a Creative Commons or other open license. Depending on type of license used, they are genearlly free to use and modify without permission.
- Open Stax College (Rice University)
- BC Campus Open ED
- Open Textbook Library
- MERLOT (material type=open textbook) (another feature on Merlot’s website allows you to search by ISBN.)
- Open Textbooks CCCOER
- Open SUNY Textbooks
- Noba–A free and open collection for psychology.
All-in-one sites for OER textbooks, course materials, multi-media, etc.
- MERLOT – Search multiple repositories
- OER Commons
- Wikieducator – Collection of Open Learning Content Repositories
- The Orange Grove: Florida’s Digital Repository
- Affordable Learning Georgia
- Affordable Learning Solutions Oklahoma
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- Public Library of Science (PLOS) – science and medicine
- PubMed Central – biomedical and life sciences
- ArXiv – Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics
- ScienceDirect Open Access – life sciences
- Oxford Open – various
- Springer Open – various
- Taylor and Francis / Routledge Open – various
Entire web-based courses with downloadable course materials. MIT’s site is pretty impressive. Their mission: “The idea is simple: to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone.” Dick K.P. Yue, Professor, MIT School of Engineering
There are just a few of the many places to find openly-licensed videos, images or illustrations. These sites may also contain copyrighted materials, but it is fairly easy to access the license information and limit your searches to open-licensed resources.
Video
- TED talks (Ted Talks Usage Policy and CC license)
- TED ed
- YouTube –type in your search term and select filter/creativecommons. Also, see this interesting blog post on embedding youtube videos on your website.
- Vimeo.com – type in your search term and select Filters/More/License
- The Khan Academy (Khan Academy CC license)
- STEM Concept Videos (MIT)
- Internet Archive – not all materials are CC licensed, make sure to check the license for your specific search.
Images & Illustrations (mostly)
- Visual Hunt
- The Creative Commons Search
- Wikimedia Commons
- Fotor.com
- Freepik
- Google Advanced Image Search (Scroll all the way down to the bottom to “Usage Rights”) “Free to use, share or modify, even commercially” is the best option for OER.
- The Noun Project
- Pixabay
- PhotosForClass
- Vecteezy
The following sites aren’t technically “open” but have some cool free and low cost resources—so worth a look.
Simulations, computer models, case studies, educational games and apps.
