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
- Authoring an Open Textbook
- Modifying an Open Textbook
- Creative Commons License Chooser
- Accessibility Toolkit
- Open Education Resources Evaluation Rubric
The Dartmouth Library and DCAL support OER through the Open Education Initiative.