Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials that are provided to educators and students at no cost. More importantly, these resources typically come with the author's express legal permission for you to use, share, and build upon the content.
The Hewlett Foundation describes OER as any "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."
Open Educational Resources will always be free. However, not all free resources are truly 'open.' What makes OER special are the licenses that guarantee you the ability to reuse, adapt, modify, and distribute the content contained within, and these licenses can never expire or be withdrawn. In other words, an open resource guarantees you perpetual access to its content, so long as you abide by the terms set out by the author.
The key defining feature of an open educational resource is its license, which gives you as the user express permission to use the work. These licenses will be clearly displayed and marked on the item, either in pictoral form or in written language. If the item does not expressly grant you permission to use it, it is likely not an OER.
Additionally, OER are typically (but not always) digital in format, and will most often come from teaching faculty at universities or from established publishers who are making their works available for free online. They are frequently housed in large repositories of open content, who will have their own criteria for inclusion.
Some of the strongest arguments in favor of OER have been based on the cost benefits for students. The College Board estimates that the average student in the United States will spend up to $1240-$1460 a year on their required course materials. As a result of these rising costs, as many as 65% of students surveyed across the United States have admitted that they deliberately choose not to purchase their course materials for certain courses. Additionally, as many as 48% of students reported that textbook costs impacted how many and which their course enrollment decisions2.
These costs translate to is a growing number of students who either cannot, or choose not to purchase their course materials - leaving them without the information necessary to be successful in their coursework. It also leads to empty chairs in classrooms due to students dropping courses that they cannot afford. Open Educational Resources are an excellent solution to the rising cost of course materials, as they are free resources available to all, guaranteeing 100% of student will have access, almost instantaneously.
With OER, the permissions for how you can use them are the clear and easy-to-understand. Many, if not most, open resources today use Creative Commons Licenses, which specify the ways you are legally allowed to access, download, use, revise, and share the materials you need.
This guarantees that you know how you are able to use the resources legally, and gives you greater opportunities to creatively use academic resources in the designing of your courses. This is particularly important as more and more courses move into digital spaces and platforms.
OER are have been freely shared by their creators. As such, there is an ever-expanding network of resources that instructors may draw upon to use in their courses - many of which have already been adopted and extensively reviewed by other instructors in your field. Since OER allow for revision and sharing in most cases, you have a greater capacity to build upon the works of others - customizing and combining resources to create innovative course curriculum.
OER also provide possible avenues for ongoing collaboration between different individuals, departments, and institutions, in order to build truly unique materials.
The links below will take you to a selection of resources related to specific subject areas taught at Augustana College. This is not an exhaustive list, but may help connect you to useful resources in that area.
By this point, you have hopefully located at least one open resource that you are interested in using in your course curriculum or research. As with any online resource, is important that you go through a quick review process to decide if the resource is of sufficient quality. We recommend that you consider the following when trying to determine the overall quality of what you have found: