Open Educational Resources (OER)

Creative Commons defines OER as teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities– retaining, remixing, revising, reusing and redistributing the resources.

Source: The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation

• Use OER to lower costs of class materials for students
• Adapt, update or correct materials as needed to suit your requirements
• Choose from a variety of learning objects, materials and technologies based specifically on your course objectives
• Incorporate interdisciplinary perspectives that might not be offered by a typical textbook
• Collaborate and network with colleagues around the globe on creation, adaptation and use of OERs

There is some disagreement on what makes a learning object, textbook or other educational resource "open." Some people equate "open" with "free", but there is more to it than that.

A truly open resource is one that you can not only access and use but one which grants you permission in perpetuity to use it in a variety of ways. The key elements that make a resource truly open are referred to as the 5Rs, and they include:

1. Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
2. Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
3. Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
4. Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
5. Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
   Source: http://opencontent.org/definition/

Portland Community College Library and Jen Klaudinyi for making their excellent OER guide shareable via the CC BY Creative Commons license. This guide borrows extensively from that work. https://guides.pcc.edu/oer