Using Open Educational Resources
While finding quality, compatible OER resources can sometimes be time consuming, there are faculty benefits to adoption. This includes having an expansive variety of resources to choose from, especially for just in time student learning opportunities.
Additionally, OER resources are not subject to traditional publishing timelines for production. OERs can be created and distributed quickly, which allows course materials to remain current and the material to stay fresh. The links below provide you a starting point for finding available OER resources in your discipline.
-
Creative Commons LicensesCreative commons licenses are central to the use of open educational resources. They tell you what you can and cannot do regarding material. While searching through OER and OA materials, keep in mind that there are different types of Creative Commons Licenses. Some will give you access to reuse and modify materials as you see fit and other licenses may not.
-
OER CommonsOER Commons is a repository of a wide array of OER resources for use in the classroom. Types of resources include: OER courses, textbooks, lessons, and assessments. Options to narrow by subject, educational level, resource type, and Creative Commons license can be useful.
-
OpenStaxOpenStax from Rice University is a collection of highly regarded open access textbooks from academic experts in their field. Selection of topics is very limited, but the instructor and student resource pages have a variety of ancillary instructional tools to accompany these OER texts.
-
Open Textbook LibraryThis textbook repository of approximately 700 textbooks has the unique feature of content reviews by academics in their respective fields.
-
MERLOTAn online repository of educational resources and tools on a wide variety of subjects. To find OER materials limit to the “Has Creative Commons” license checkbox. Repository is similar to OER Commons, but it uses a slightly different set of search criteria.
-
Mason OER MetafinderThis resource is an OER metasearch tool created by George Mason University to search multiple OER sites and repositories at once. It’s a good tool for finding materials on harder to locate subjects.