What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (also known as OER) are teaching and learning resources that reside in the public domain or have been shared under a license, usually a Creative Commons license,  that allows others to freely use and revise them. Open educational resources can include entire courses, course materials, textbooks, multimedia, or teaching techniques. By definition, OER are

1. Free: available to all students regardless of socioeconomic status on the first day of class AND
2. Flexible: permissions provide the ability to legally change and improve the resource or alter it so it’s more relevant for your specific course. These permissions are often called “the 5 Rs” or the ability to reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute  (Wiley, 2014).

Thus, unlike traditionally copyrighted materials which require permission (or sometimes payment) to reuse, OER enables the author to retain copyright while also explicitly telling others how they can use the work. This is exciting for education for a few reasons. The permissions inherent in OER mean that educators can pool resources/ expertise to create the best course materials as a community. OER also enables instructors to localize resources to their context so that they are most relevant to their resources.

Free is not the same as open. Thus, if someone shares a lesson plan on their website and doesn’t put a Creative Commons license on it, it isn’t an OER. The same goes for multi-user eBooks through the library that classes might use as textbooks, they save students money but they are missing that license and therefore are not OER.

The open education community is also starting to think more deeply about what “open” really means and how we build off of each others’ work. If an OER is shared under a Creative Commons that allows adaption, that’s great! Theoretically and legally, the OER can be adapted, sections can be deleted, new material can be added. But what are the constraints to actually adapting it? What kind of technology or software do you need to do so? This might be an important third piece of our definition of OER:

1. An object used for teaching and learning
2. Shared under a license that enables others to reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute AND
3. Shared in a format and with enough context for others to reasonably alter the object

For more information, watch the following video, an introduction to OER for higher education faculty from Iowa State University. (~3.5 minutes)

“An Introduction to Open Educational Resources” by Abbey Elder is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International license.