What can OER do for me?
OER can:
- increase student success.
- lower the cost of higher education and save students money.
- help you find new ideas, activities and resources posted by instructors from around the world.
- help you locate textbooks that are peer reviewed and frequently updated.
Learn more about OER Pros/Cons and Evaluation Methods
Open Educational Resources (OER) are guided by the idea that
high-quality educational materials should be available to everyone.
OER materials—everything from a single lesson plan to an entire textbook—save students and teachers money because they are free to use, customize, and share.
OER are openly licensed, which make them easy to personalize and infuse with fresh, relevant content.
What's the difference between OER and Open Access?
OER materials are freely and publicly available 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 access refers to teaching, learning and research materials that are available free online for anyone to use as is, but they may not be revised, remixed, or redistributed.
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What can I do with OER?
Open content uses licensing that grant users permission to:
- Retain - Make, own, and control (download, duplicate, store, and manage)
- Reuse - Use the content in a wide range of ways (in class, study group, website, video, anthology, in software)
- Revise - Adapt, adjust, customize, or alter the content (translate, modify, reorganize, change formats)
- Remix - Combine original or revised content with other material to create something new (mashup, anthology, package)
- Redistribute - Share copies of the original content, your revisions or remixes (share publicly online, give a copy to a friend)
This material is an adaptation of Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources,
originally written by David Wiley and available under a CC4.0 license