Open Educational Resources (OER): Home

According to UNESCO: "Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational materials in the public domain, or released with an open license, that allows users to legally and freely use, copy, adapt, and re-share.  This means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them.  OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation."

Open Educational Resources was started as a movement by educators worldwide. It was funded by grants and private donations (particularly from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has given more than $110 million in support of OERs).  The OER movement has attempted to bring into the educational process groups who were traditionally shut out, including K-12 teachers, scientists and engineers working in the industry rather than in academia, and those who aren’t fluent in English.  The OER movement’s goal is to make education available to everyone around the world (particularly those in the developing world, who could not otherwise afford an education, as well as self-learners).

The OER movement has become an institutional movement with early pioneers such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology putting an increasing amount of course material which includes complete course lectures online. (By 2010, MIT’s OpenCourseWare site contained material for approximately 2000 classes in more than 30 academic disciplines, and more material is still being added; as of 2013, material is available for approximately 2150 classes.)

Prestigious educational institutions, such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and U.C. Berkeley, have begun to make  some of their educational content freely available online.

Generally, completion of an institution's OER material does not allow those who access the material to receive degrees, certificates, or course credit, and users no not have access to the institution's faculty members. An exceptions to this, would be an institution like, the Khan Academy, which provides access to more than 4400 videos on a variety of topics, awards badges to people who complete various tasks on the site. In May 2012, MIT and Harvard announced edX, a learning platform that may award certificates for people who demonstrate mastery of edX course material.

The worldwide educational community met in September 2007 in Cape Town, South Africa and produced the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, a document advocating the continued development and sharing of OERs in support of worldwide education, particularly in developing countries.

Currently, there are more than 300 institutions in more than 30 countries around the world that are creating or using OERs.  OER material is available in more than 10 languages.

Open content uses free license that grant users permission to:

Retain - Make, own, and control (download, duplicate, store, and manage)

Reuse - Use the content in a wide range of ways (in class, study group, website, video, anthology, in software)

Revise - Adapt, adjust, customize, or alter the content (translate, modify, reorganize, change formats)

Remix - Combine original or revised content with other material to create something new (mashup, anthology, package)

Redistribute - Share copies of the original content, your revisions or remixes (share publicly online, give a copy to a friend)

See also: Best practices for attribution of Creative Commons licensed works

This material is based on original work by David Wiley, and you can download, edit, and share the original for free under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license from: http://www.opencontent.org/definition

The following are some repositories for open materials developed by colleges and universities:

• Open, but undiscovered
• The 5 Rs of designing an OER course
• In U.S. Higher Education, 2014
• Two-Thirds of Faculty Unaware of Open Education Resources -- Campus Technology
• Impact of Social Sciences – The Open Educational Resources Impact Map: researching impact through openness and collaboration.
• ACRL sponsors new 'Interactive Open Educational Resources' book | News & Press Center
  “Interactive Open Educational Resources: A Guide to Finding, Choosing, and Using What’s Out There to Transform College Teaching” - we'll make sure to order this for the WSU Libraries!
• White Paper: Open Educational Resources | Hewlett Foundation
  "The result of our research is this white paper, which presents a roadmap for transforming teaching and learning by shifting OER from a small-scale movement to standard education practice."
• Students saving money with open textbooks | BC Newsroom
  Tagline: "British Columbia's open textbooks project already has helped almost 300 post-secondary students, who saved an average of $146 each on their textbook costs for the fall 2013 semester."
• Ethics in the Open | [OER Research Hub]
  Feds Hint at Launching OER-Powered Online Skills Academy -- Campus Technology