Open Educational Resources

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials that are distributed at no cost with legal permission for the public to freely use, share, and build upon the content. The Hewlett Foundation defines OER as “teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge” 

"OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." - Hewlett Foundation

The 5Rs of Openness (David Wiley)

Further Reading

Open Textbooks Could Help Students

• The Cost and Quality of Open Textbooks:

  The Cost and Quality of Open Textbooks: Perceptions of community college faculty and students. by TJ Bliss, John Hilton, David Wiley and Kim Thanos.

  more...
• 7 Things You Should Know about OERs

  This PDF comes from EDUCAUSE
• On Quality and OER

  Blogpost by David Wiley
• Report: Make Textbooks Affordable

  As publishers keep costs high by pumping out new editions and selling books bundled with software, students are forced to forgo book purchases or otherwise undermine their academic progress.

Why should I adopt an open textbook?

Open textbooks are more affordable than commercially available textbooks; this permits student education budgets to stretch further, thus giving students greater flexibility in their education choices. Furthermore, faculty can readily customize open textbooks to better meet their local teaching and learning needs. Open textbooks provide pricing, flexibility and customization advantages that commercially available textbooks currently do not provide, customize and update open textbooks.

How do OER help educators and students?

Open educational resources give educators the ability to adapt instructional resources to the individual needs of their students, to ensure that resources are up-to-date, and to ensure that cost is not a barrier to accessing high-quality standards-aligned resources. OER are already being used across America in K-12, higher education, workforce training, informal learning, and more.

What is the difference between ‘free’ and ‘open’ resources?

Open educational resources are and always will be free, but not all free resources are OER. Free resources may be temporarily free or may be restricted from use at some time in the future (including by the addition of fees to access those resources). Moreover, free-but-not-open resources may not be modified, adapted or redistributed without obtaining special permission from the copyright holder.

Are all OER digital?

Like most educational resources these days, most OER start as digital files. But like traditional resources, OER can be made available to students in both digital and printed formats. Of course, digital OER are easier to share, modify, and redistribute, but being digital is not what makes something an OER or not. This flexibility is important, because it no longer makes print and digital a choice of one or the other. OER textbooks, for example, can typically be printed for $5-50 (compared to $100-300 for traditional books) while still being available free digitally.

How do you tell if an educational resource is an OER?

The key distinguishing characteristic of OER is its intellectual property license and the freedoms the license grants to others to share and adapt it. If a lesson plan or activity is not clearly tagged or marked as being in the public domain or having an open license, it is not OER. It’s that simple. The most common way to release materials as OER is through Creative Commons copyright licenses, which are standardized, free-to-use open licenses that have already been used on more than 1 billion copyrighted works.

What are the disadvantages to using open textbooks?

Some disadvantages of OER include:

• Quality of available OER materials is inconsistent. However, this is also true of commercial textbooks, which vary widely in quality. As the number of open textbooks increases, there will be a concomitant increase in overall quality.
• Materials may not meet Section 508 ADA accessibility requirements and must be modify to bring into compliance. In fact, this is true of many commercial textbooks. Open textbooks will ultimately meet and exceed Section ADA accessibility requirements, as currently fulfilled on commercially available textbooks.
• Faculty need to check for accuracy of content of open content, just as they do with commercially available content.
• Customization may be necessary to match departmental and/or college curriculum requirements. However, customization of content will ultimately be more flexible in open content than it currently is in commercially available content.
• Technical requirements to access the content vary. Interoperability standards that permit transportability across many technology platforms are now in the making.

Can OER be high quality if it is free?

Studies at both the K-12 and higher education levels show that students who use OER do as well, and often better, than their peers using traditional resources. Also, many OER are developed through rigorous peer review and production processes that mirror traditional materials. However, it is important to note that being open or closed does not inherently affect the quality of a resource. Being open does enable educators to use the resource more effectively, which can lead to better outcomes. For example, OER can be updated, tailored and improved locally to fit the needs of students, and it also eliminates cost as a barrier for students to access their materials. 

This FAQ page of the guide was created using resources from Creative Commons, Consortium for Open Education Resources, and Director of Neil Butcher & Associates; policy & technical expert on education planning, use of educational technology and distance education under a CC 3.0 and CC-BY 4.0 licenses.