Open Educational Resources (OER)

Benefits of using OER

• Affordability, supports educational equity
• Increased access to and customizability of course materials
• Can be continually updated and improved
• Opportunities for faculty professional development and innovation
• Supports open pedagogy 
• Easily embedded and linkable in Canvas

Question: What if I don’t have time to find OER or I don’t know where to start searching?

Answer: Ask a librarian for help finding relevant, high-quality OER for your classes. We’re happy to help you find resources that fit your needs.

Question: Aren’t OER less reliable and of lower quality than traditional textbooks?

Answer:  Many OER go through the process of peer review–you just need to know where to find them. Use the resources listed below to find high-quality OER that have been peer-reviewed.

Question: What if my students prefer print textbooks?

Answer: Many OER offer the option to print pages as PDFs, so students can print the pages they need if they so choose. Some OER are also offered in physical format, such as OpenStax textbooks. 

Question: What am I allowed to do with openly licensed resources?

Answer: You can learn more about different types of open licenses and their permissions with them here and in the “What can I do with OER?” section of this guide below. Additionally, this page explains which license you should choose if you create your own OER.

Adapted from Penn State’s “Challenges of Using OER and How to Overcome Them” guide.

There are many resources available for finding and evaluating OER. Below are resources for finding specific types of OER. Don’t hesitate to contact a librarian to help you find relevant OER for your courses!

Textbook and open course collections

• BC Campus OpenEd: Open textbooks for the 40 highest enrolled first- and second-year subject areas in the British Columbia’s public, post-secondary system.
• Mason OER Metafinder (MOM): Searches across 21 different sources of open educational materials (including many of the collections listed here); searches are done in real-time so you’ll always get the most updated results.
• MERLOT: A collection of tens of thousands of discipline-specific educational resources.
• MIT OpenCourseWare: Access the materials, lectures, syllabi, and more from 2400 of MIT’s courses. 
• OASIS: Use this tool from SUNY Geneseo to search open content from over 100 different sources; contains over 385,000 records. 
• OER Commons: A digital library of educational resources, including over 1800 textbooks. Browse by subject, collection, or search for specific resources, and read reviews from others who have used these resources. 
• OpenStax: OpenStax textbooks are available free online and can be purchased in print as well. The textbooks are peer-reviewed and are updated periodically. 
• Open Textbook Library: A library of high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks that can be freely used and downloaded. Browse by subject or search for specific resources and read reviews from others who have used these textbooks.
• SUNY Open Textbooks: Open textbooks from the State University of New York system. Textbooks offered in a wide variety of disciplines.

Audio, images, and video

• Creative Commons Search: Search for openly licensed and public domain images using CC Search.
• Free Music Archive: Freely accessible and royalty-free music.
• Getty: Browse through Getty’s 100,000+ open content images. 
• Internet Archive: A/V Geeks: A collection of over 25,000 films including civil defense & public service films shot by the government.
• Internet Archive: VJ Loops: Short, stylized, loopable video loops, typically used by VJs. Download from this archive or submit your own works to contribute to this growing community.
• Pexels: Free stock photos; all openly licensed and downloadable.
• Pixabay: High quality stock photos and videos.
• Smithsonian Open Access: access over 3 million digital items from the Smithsonian’s collections. 
• SoundCloud: Find tracks you can download and use in projects via this CC search in SoundCloud. 
• Unsplash: A growing collection of high-quality, freely usable images with CC licenses. Several institutions, such as the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, have added historical photos to Unsplash’s collections.
• Vimeo: A collection of Creative Commons licensed videos on Vimeo. 
• Wikimedia Commons: Access the 65+ million freely available media sources from Wikimedia Commons, which include images, audio, and videos. 

OER are openly licensed, most often with Creative Commons licensing or through the public domain. Creative Commons licenses allow you to engage with the 5Rs of open.

The 5Rs

1. Retain: make, own, and control a copy of the resource
2. Revise: edit, adapt, and modify your copy of the resource
3. Remix: combine your original or revised copy of the resource with other existing material to create something new
4. Reuse: use your original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource publicly
5. Redistribute: share copies of your original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource with others 

Source: David Wiley, Open Content blog

Creative Commons Licenses

Here is brief explanation of what Creative Commons Licenses are and how they work:

“The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional ‘all rights reserved’ setting that copyright law creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.”

Source: Creative Commons 

There are four components of Creative Commons licenses, which are:

• Attribution (BY): Proper attribution must be given to the original creator of the work. This includes a link to the original work, information about the author, and information about the original work’s license.
• Share-Alike (SA): Iterations of the original work must be made available under the same license terms.
• Non-Commercial (NC): The work cannot be sold at a profit or used for commercial means such as for-profit advertising. Copies of the work can be purchased in print and given away or sold at cost.
• No Derivatives (ND): The work cannot be altered or “remixed.” Only identical copies of the work can be redistributed without additional permission from the creator.

Attribution: “The Four Components of Creative Commons Licenses” from The OER Starter Kit by Abbey K. Elder, CC-BY 4.0. View the full work here. 

These four components can be combined to create a total of six different Creative Commons licenses, varying in openness and what they allow users to do.