Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources (OER) are free and publicly available teaching, learning, and research materials and media that live in the public domain or are licensed to permit their free use and re-purposing. For example, instructors can download OER material, modify it to their course, save a copy locally to share with their students and share it back out with attribution to the original material. Learn more about Creative Commons Licensing. 

OER can include textbooks, course materials and full courses, or components such as modules, streaming videos, quizzes, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. 

Many library materials are licensed and available for course use at no cost to students. Consult the Faculty FAQ for more information on linking to library resources or placing items on electronic course reserves.

Use the Course Reserve Form to request items.

The above image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Benefits of OER

The advantages of Open Educational Resources (OER) include:

• Expense: No-cost or low-cost materials for students.
• Equity and Access: materials can be accessed anywhere, anytime.
• Teaching Freedom: open materials are fully revisable and remixable, and can be customized to a specific course, which allows instructors to include more teaching materials that might be missing from a traditional textbook.
• Improved Quality from Collaboration: materials are being created individually or collaboratively by subject experts, but anyone, including students, can be involved in the creation, revision, and distribution of OER, and instructors can also use OER to engage in “open pedagogy,” assignments to create more meaningful learning experiences.
• Lifelong Learning: provides access to educational materials after a course ends or students graduate, and provides an avenue for alumni seeking learning tools.