LIBRARY GUIDE TO Open Educational Resources for Faculty

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others, in accordance to their Creative Commons license.

Open Educational Resources are broadly considered to meet the “5Rs Framework,” meaning that users are free to:

• Retain: Users have the right to make, archive, and "own" copies of the content;
• Reuse:  Content can be reused in its unaltered form;
• Revise: Content can be adapted, adjusted, modified or altered;
• Remix: The original or revised content can be combined with other content to create something new;
• Redistribute: Copies of the content can be shared with others in its original, revised or remixed form.

OER's are part of the Open Education movement that believes knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use. Read more about OER on wikipedia and in the Free to Learn Guide produced as a result of a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

*Examples of Open Pedagogy can be found posted on the Open Pedagogy Notebook

What are some examples of OER Materials?   

• Full university courses, complete with readings, videos of lectures, homework assignments, and lecture notes.
• Interactive mini-lessons and simulations about a specific topic, such as math or physics.
• Adaptations of existing open work.
• Electronic textbooks that are peer-reviewed and frequently updated.
• Elementary school and high school (K-12) lesson plans, worksheets, and activities that are aligned with state standards.

OpenEdGroup - interdisciplinary group of people working to promote research on the OER. 

Open Education newsletter - can subscribe or read past newsletters 

#OER on Twitter 

 

• Open Access resources for Faculty
• Textbooks* @ OU and beyond

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

OER Resources

• California Open Online Library for Education - search engine for courses, textbooks and with peer-reviews
• The Orange Grove- Floridia's repository of OER
• MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
• OER Commons - offers a comprehensive infrastructure for curriculum experts and instructors at all levels to identify high-quality OER and collaborate around their adaptation, evaluation, and use to address the needs of teachers and learners.
• OASIS -  search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. 
• OpenResources for STEM - Open Education Consortium (OEC)

Open Textbooks:

• Affordable Learning Georgia - List of courses and the adopted OER resource for top 100 undergraduate courses
• Openstax College: free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course. collaboration with Rice University
• OpenCulture - over 200 free textbooks pulled from a variety of openedu sites.
• Open Textbooks- a collection of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks.
• Open Textbook library - search tool to help instructors find affordable, quality textbook solutions. All textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed. (created by University of Minnesota with university parnters like Purdue, Cleveland State, Oregon State)
• Open SUNY Textbooks - large subject catalog of open textbooks available for adoption and reuse
• Flatworld Knowledge - ($) catalog of low-cost, not open books for faculty to adopt

Open Courses and supplemental materials (some with $ structure) 

• MIT OpenWare - is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world.
• OEDd - Open Education database - A tool that lets you explore over 10,000 free open courses and interactive resources from top universities around the world.
• Study.com - ($) courses and supplemental content fee-based  

• Creative Commons Search (beta)
• WikiMedia commons
• Flickr creative commons images website
• SoundCloud  place for creators looking to share and distribute music and audio online.

This is a growing list of resources based on requests from faculty. If you would like a subject list created contact your librarian. 

• Anthropology
• Criminal Justice
• Linguistics 
• Modern Languages
• Psychology 
• Sociology
• Social Work 

If the subject your are looking for is not listed above try checking the following guides:

• OASIS -  Search engine developed by SUNY to make discovery of open content easier.
• Michigan Colleges Online subject list
• UConn Library open textbooks by subject guide.
• UOklahoma Libraries discipline guide 

COURSE ADOPTIONS

• Affordable Georgia course adoption list
• Cood4Ed - University of California system adoptions
• OpenTextbook Library (University of Minnesota) - discover books - read reviews
• OpenSuny - list of books

Creative Commons licenses are legally enforceable licenses that creators and other rights holders can use to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other right with the aim of expanding the range of things available for others to share, quote, adapt, and build upon.

Creative Commons licenses do two things:

• They allow creators to share their work easily
• They allow everyone to find work that is free to use without having to obtain permission

As long as you obey the terms of the license attached to the work, you can use Creative Commons licensed material without fear of accidentally infringing someone’s copyright. 

The nonprofit Creative Commons organization works to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.

• Learn about Creative Commons licenses
• Creative Commons license for Education

For more on each CC licenses and how they are used read descriptions on the CC website and or download this guide.

Types of Creative Commons licenses:

graphic borrowed from https://theindiedesign.co/creative-commons-royalty-free-public-domain-licenses/
 

Using a CC license enables for open educational resources to allow for the 5R's 

• Retain
• Reuse
• Revise
• Remix
• Redistribute

When a creator or copyright holder assigns an open license to their work they are specifying how they want others to reuse it. Open licensing does not replace copyright. Open licenses work with copyright to promote shared use. This changes the copyright from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”  More info https://www.cccoer.org/learn/open-licensing/

1. You can use the license chooser to determine which license is right for you. 
   Or
2. Download creative commons license logos and use on your work