Open Educational Resources FAQs

Here’s the Hewlett Foundation’s oft-shared definition: “Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”

Open educational resources can include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, data sets, streaming media, recorded lectures, video tutorials, tests and quizzes, software, and other tools, resources, materials, or techniques used to support access to and sharing of knowledge.

Open Educational Resources are broadly considered to meet the “5Rs Framework,” meaning that users are free to:

Some Sources for OER Beginners 

Heather Richards, Academic Instructional Designer at Nichols, has created an excellent course, ‘Introduction to OER‘, in Canvas at https://nichols.instructure.com/courses/1867.

This self-paced course is designed to provide Nichols College faculty members an overview of the OER’s landscape. This will allow you to identify, integrate, and (maybe) produce OER’s for your own courses and to find support for your efforts on your Nichols College campus. The course is based on fundamental questions about OER’s:

• Why OER?
• What types of resources are available as OER, and how do I find and evaluate them?
• How are OER licensed?
• How can I integrate OER into my own courses/curriculum?
• What if I want to adapt an OER, or produce my own OER?
• What kind of support is available at Nichols College?

Other sources include:

Open Education Consortium The Open Education Consortium is a great place to start when learning about or searching for OER. It provides a wealth of information as well as some great OER search tools.

OER Handbook for Educators This handbook is designed to help educators find, use, develop and share OER to enhance their effectiveness online and in the classroom.

OpenContent.org This is OER Leader David Wiley’s homepage that includes his blog, updates and other tools for those interested in using and justifying OER.

EDUCAUSE OER Library Articles, presentations, and more on OERs from EDUCAUSE.

What is the difference between OER and other free resources online?

All Open Educational Resources are free to access, but not all free resources are OER. What makes OER different is their open licenses, customizable copyright licenses that allow users to edit, redistribute, and remix content. Free-but-not-open resources cannot be edited without obtaining permission from the copyright holder.

Are Open Educational Resources Peer Reviewed?

Many OER, especially open textbooks like those created by OpenStax and others (see list below), are developed through rigorous production and peer review processes that mirror traditional methods. After production, OER can be updated, tailored, and improved locally to fit the needs of

Why Use OER?

Penn State (among many others) provides some excellent reasons and benefits of using OER here.

And here is a list of some of the potential benefits from Library Instruction Round Table News (Dec. 2018) that address three of the great challenges facing higher education today: affordability, retention and completion, and quality of student learning.

For Faculty

1. Enables more effective reflection about teaching practices;
2. Tailors learning material to the specific course, teaching style, and learner’s needs;
3. Allows easy modification and adaptation of materials to reflect currency in the discipline;
4. Enables incorporation of interactive content, such as media or quizzes;
5. Eliminates issues with traditional textbooks such as ordering deadlines or unavailability when class begins.

For Students

1. Contributes to the lessening of higher education costs and student debt;
2. Grants access to all materials for all students on the first day of class;
3. Potentially improves interaction and engagement with the learning materials.

For the Institution

1. Helps address the affordability and accessibility of education;
2. Potentially increases retention and completion rates;
3. Potentially brings prestige and increased enrollment for its effort to make education more affordable.