Open Educational Resources are any type of teaching, learning, or research materials that reside in the public domain or are are published under an open license, like Creative Commons, that permits their free use, repurposing, adaption and redistribution by others.
OER may include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, quizzes, assignments, software, and other tools or materials to support access to knowledge. Learn more about open textbooks below.
Open textbooks are like other textbooks, except that a dedicated teams of authors, instructional designers, and/or organizations have made them available for free and have given users permission through open licensing to adapt them for their students and curriculum.
Open textbooks are usually licensed under Creative Commons licenses, which give permissions to all open textbook users to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute them. These are commonly referred to as the 5Rs as defined by David Wiley. Although new commercial platforms exist to provide instant textbook access, only open textbooks allow adaptation and remixing, and there is no cost to students.
Open textbooks are funded through a variety of groups, state agencies, state and federal legislation, university presses, libraries and library consortia, nonprofit organizations, individual institutions, and individual authors who create their own materials.
Open resources harnesses the power of the Internet to make education more affordable, accessible, and effective by improving teaching and learning, removing textbook costs as a barrier to education, and providing access to quality materials. -- Adapted from SPARC
While OER has a broad definition, if a work is not free or openly licensed, it cannot be considered as an open educational resource. For example, library subscriptions provide access to materials that cannot be altered, remixed, or redistributed. These materials require special permission to use and therefore cannot be considered “open.” For material to be OER, it must be openly licensed, freely available, and modifiable.
Abbey Elder, author of The OER Starter Kit, provides this table to help identify OER materials from other resources.
| Material Type | Openly Licensed | Freely Available | Modifiable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Educational Resource | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free online resource under all rights reserved copyright | No | Yes | No |
| Materials available through the University Library | No | Yes | No |
| Open access articles and monographs | Yes | No | Maybe |
Note: Although some materials are free to access for a library’s users, that does not mean that they are free to access for everyone as usage restrictions may apply. Similarly, while some open access resources are made available under a copyright license that enables modification, this is not always the case.
Source: The OER Starter Kit by Abbey K. Elder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
"Open" permissions or open license refers to the intellectual property rights of the copyright owner and provides permissions that are typically defined in terms of the "5R's" referring to a users ability to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute these educational materials.
The frequently referred to 5Rs framework comes from David Wiley and is adapted from Wiley's blog page published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.
What and Why OER Matter (54-Minute Video)
David Wiley, "High Impact Practices for Integrating Open Educational Resources (OER) into University Courses," 54 min video with closed captions, CC BY