Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and research. OER is the leading trend in distance education and is also popular in more typical classroom-style education.
Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed materials. These can include anything from entire courses worth of content to narrow individual topics, as well as pedagogical tools such as syllabi, lecture notes, and assessment banks.Â
OER search portals can be used to find these materials. The OER Commons website, for example, allows users to search for content by subject area, education level (primary, secondary, post-secondary), material types (labs, syllabi, video lectures), and keywords. This material is free for all to access, and the OER Commons website is working to broaden and expand curriculum and enrich learning experiences through open educational resources. OpenStax is another example of a site that provides free open educational resources in the form of textbooks. OpenStax allows students to access free textbooks that can be modified by either the teacher or the student to suit the particular needs of a class or learning experience.
OER can be freely accessed, modified, and shared because they are protected by flexible licensing licensing. Traditional educational resources, such as print textbooks, are almost exclusively copyrighted. This means you must pay to access them and cannot distribute them without the knowledge of the publisher—therefore, they are not open educational resources. However, alternative licensing options have become available as a result of the work of the nonprofit organization Creative Commons. The Creative Commons licenses enable the sharing and use of creativity, knowledge, and content in a structure that is accessible to the general public, not just copyright lawyers. These licenses allow the author of a work to set the copyright permissions themselves, choosing what specific rights they will reserve or waive (i.e., what they will allow the reader or user to do or not do). Examples of Creative Commons licensing that are attached to OER include CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, and CC-BY-NC-SA.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons logo.