Open educational resources (OER) can range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests,, audio, video, and animation. These materials are either in the public domain or licensed in a manner that provides users with permission to engage in the any of the “5Rs” – the ability to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute them. Watch “An Introduction to Open Educational Resources” to learn more.

OER Benefits

  • Replacing expensive textbooks and course materials with OER gives students significant savings and equal access.
  • They are available online the first day of term. 
  • Courses using OER have been found to have lower DFW rates and students achieve higher grades (Colvard, Watson, and Park, 2018).
  • Educators can customize content for their students.
  • With OER, educators can share their content globally.

Finding OER 

  • BCcampus – Includes textbooks from the British Columbia Open Textbook Project.
  • Merlot - Learning materials and exercises submitted by the MERLOT community.
  • MIT OpenCourseWare - MIT course content published openly for all to use.
  • OER Commons - A collection of open educational resources. This database was created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education.
  • OpenStax - Open textbook initiative based at Rice University. Textbooks are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
  • Open SUNY Textbooks - Open SUNY Textbooks is an open textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries.
  • Open Textbook Library - Provides textbooks that are openly licensed, free, and peer-reviewed.

Resources

The Dartmouth Library and DCAL support OER through the Open Education Initiative.

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