What is OER?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are free educational materials that are openly licensed to enable reuse and redistribution by users. They are:
- Openly- licensed: a set of authorized permissions from the rights holder of a work for any and all users.
- Freely Available: must be freely available online with no fee to access. Physical OER may be sold at low cost to facilitate printing.
- Modifiable: The resource must be made available under an open license that allows for editing.
Source: The OER Starter Kit by Abbey K. Elder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
An Introduction to OER
The first two minutes of this video are worth watching to better understand why Students should care about OER materials.
Sources for Student Advocacy: Getting Started
- OER Student ToolkitAdvocacy guide for student leaders.
- Open Textbooks Organizing ToolkitFor student governments and other student leaders looking for instructions and tips on how to bring open textbooks to your campus.
Public Interest Research Groups or PIRGS have mobilized on college campuses around the country since 1971. They help give students a vehicle to protect the environment, serve the campus and community, uncover consumer rip-offs, and promote good government. PIRG resources related to OER are found below:
- Student PIRG: Activist ToolkitGuide on how to make change happen for effective citizenship.
- Student PIRG: Make Textbooks Affordable CampaignOverview of key issues and how to initiate action.
- Student PIRG: Fixing the Broken Textbook Market 3edA survey on college textbook affordability during COVID-19.
- Student PIRG: Open 101: An Action Plan for Affordable TextbooksA report outlining recommendations on how to save students money by reducing textbook costs.
Sources of OER Resources
Open Educational Textbook Locations:
- BC Campus Open EdA repository of open textbooks peer reviewed and adapted by faculty in British Columbia, Canada.
- LibreTexts: Free the TextbookThe LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.
- Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)Metasearch engine searches targets in real-time, instantly returning several hundred relevant hits from each site.
- MERLOTA repository of free and open online teaching materials with peer reviews.
- Milne Open TextbooksFormerly Open SUNY. It is the publishing initiative from the State University of New York.
- OASISMetasearch engine searches targets in real-time, instantly returning several hundred relevant hits from each site.
- OER CommonsFree, adaptable, openly licensed textbooks and supplemental resources.
- OpenStaxFrom Rice University, an open textbook publisher of high-quality print and mobile platform texts for general education courses. Many include supplemental resources.
- Open Textbook LibraryListing of high quality open textbooks with faculty peer reviews at the University of Minnesota.
- Saylor Academy Open TextbooksA repository of openly licensed books available for download in word or pdf format.
OER Textbook Examples
- OpenStax Textbook ExamplesIntroductory/General Education textbooks.
- OpenTextbook LibraryIntroduction to Psychology textbook example. Use search bar to identify subject of your choice.
Examples are found below:
