Open Educational Resources (OER)

CARLI which UIS is a governing member supports the CARLI Open Illinois Initiative is a commitment to facilitate members’ use and support of Open Educational Resources (OER), especially training, advocacy, and coordination of cooperative effort for the benefit of CARLI libraries.e. Their Open Educational Resources page provides information on OER as well as links to OER Repositories for Courses, Textbooks, and Other sites and materials.

Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) is a USG initiative to promote student success by supporting the implementation of affordable alternatives to expensive commercial textbooks. For help understanding CC licensing, there is a wealth of information at https://www.affordablelearninggeorgia.org/help/finding-4. Creative Commons has also developed a search engine to help with the discovery of these materials, https://search.creativecommons.org/

Information on OER from UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization)

Created by BCcampus and the Centre for Accessible Post-secondary Education Resources. The goal of the Accessibility Toolkit is to provide information to open textbook writers, publishers, and other content creators on how to create truly open and accessible textbooks. There is also a useful checklist at the end of the book that can be used as a quick reference guide when reviewing an open textbook for accessibility.

MIT OpenCourseWare is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world

The OERu makes education accessible to everyone. Coordinated by the OER Foundation, they are an independent, not-for-profit network that offers free online courses for students worldwide. It also provides affordable ways for learners to gain academic credit towards qualifications from recognized institutions.

Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working to offer free and open online courses with nearly 100 full-length courses at the college and professional levels. Saylor Academy provides modern, digital certificates of completion and allows for earning tuition-free college credit through a network of partner schools.

SkillsCommons is a free and open online library containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. This collection contains a comprehensive collection of workforce-related Open Educational Resources (OER) created by over 700 community colleges across the nation. These materials can be found, reused, revised, retained, redistributed and remixed by an individual, institution, and industry for FREE with the proper attribution to the original author of the resources.

The B.C. Open Education Librarians (BCOEL) have developed an excellent guide to locating OER resources besides their collection of Open Textbooks. An additional feature is a rubric to help you choose an open textbook for your course.

Simple overview of the various Creative Commons Licenses used for Open Access and OER

Overview of the rights granted by the various Creative Commons Licenses