Intro to Open Educational Resources (OER) for Instructors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

What are open educational resources (OER)? OER are educational materials that are both free to read and openly licensed. OER can include everything from full courses and textbooks to photos, streaming videos, and tests. To truly be open, they’re licensed using Creative Commons licenses which allows people to share, use, and build upon the work they’ve created. The licensing piece is important to OER because it means that instructors can share and remix materials in ways that they can’t with commercial material or even course material that’s just posted online. So, what are the benefits of using OER in the classroom?

Saves students money

Think back to when you were an undergraduate. Did you ever decide to not buy a textbook because of the cost? I know that as an undergrad, I bought older editions of textbooks than the ones assigned to save money. One of the obvious benefits of OER is that they can save students a lot of money. Textbooks are expensive. The average cost of a textbook was $82 in 2014, which was a 44% increase from the average cost in 2007. In fact, college textbook prices have increased faster than inflation, tuition, and even health care costs. With the increasing cost of textbooks, many students make the decision not to buy them. Since OER are free, they can offer great savings to students.

Revise and Remix

One of the greatest benefits to both students and faculty is the ability to revise and remix open content. See a mistake in an OER? Want to use a newer example? Because the content is open, instructors have the ability to revise and update OER. There’s no need to write to a publisher and wait for the next edition to come out. The ability to remix content is also a huge advantage. Educators have the ability to take parts of different curriculum that they like and combine them or edit them to make a more customized course!

Resources for OERs

So where can you find open content and more information about OER? Fortunately, there’s a lot of great resources if you want to adopt or write your own open content.

The Open Textbook Library is a collection of free openly-licensed textbooks.

The Review Project is a collection of scholarly articles, focusing on empirical research related to OER adoption and use.

Open Stax is nonprofit based at Rice University that publishes openly-licensed textbooks.

Creative Commons is non-profit that has released a number of copyright licenses that allows creators to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License