What Are Open Educational Resources?
Open Educational Resources Defined
Open educational resources, also known as OER, are freely available educational materials licensed to permit copying, sharing, editing, retaining, and using (Ernst, Cohen, & Kaufman, 2018).
Free vs. Open
At Bucknell, we have many options for providing "free" educational resources to students. For instance, students can borrow textbooks and other materials that have been placed on course reserve in the library. Some assigned course readings, including books and journal articles, are available through library databases. Some course materials may be available as open access content on the web. In these cases, students have free access to the materials.
But these resources are not open. To be open, a resource must contain a license that gives users certain permissions. We refer to these permissions as the "5 Rs" (Wiley, 2014).
The 5 Rs
According to David Wiley (2014), the 5 Rs give us the following permissions:
- Retain - we can make and keep copies of the material
- Reuse - we can use the material for various purposes
- Revise - we can customize and edit the material
- Remix - we can create new works from the material
- Redistribute - we can share the original or derivative works
So what's the difference between OER and Open Access?
Anita Walz, Associate Professor and Assistant Director for Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Virginia Tech created a one-page document that shows how OER are always open access, but open access materials may not always be OER.
Finding OER
A small sampling of open content collections:
- OER CommonsCollections of open materials covering a wide range of subjects.
- OpenStaxOpenStax from Rice University offers free, online educational materials and textbooks.
- Open Textbook LibraryThe Open Textbook Library from the University of Minnesota provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
Search engines:
- George Mason University MetafinderSearches across 21 OER sources. Includes a visual tool for filtering results.
- SUNY Geneseo's OASISSearches across 98 sources.
Learn More
Are you ready to learn more about open education and open educational resources?
Contact Jill Hallam-Miller, Interim Director of Research Services and Information Literacy, to find out when we're hosting OER/Open Education workshops or to talk about finding or adopting open educational resources for your courses.
Why Open @ Bucknell?
During Open Education Week 2018 (March 5-9), we posed the following question to students via a whiteboard near the library cafe: "If you didn't have to pay so much for textbooks, what could you do instead?" Here's what our students told us...
And Because...
The high cost of textbooks causes students to make choices that may impact their academic success, as shown in the table below. This information, compiled by Ernst, Cohen, and Kaufman (2018) comes from the 2012 Florida Student Textbook Survey (Florida Virtual Campus, 2012).
And Also Because...
More reasons to embrace open education and open educational resources...
- Remove financial barriers to education
- Ensure day-one access to course content
- Customize and remix course content
- Innovate in pedagogy - students can engage in new ways with course content
(Ernst, Cohen, & Kaufman, 2018; SPARC, 2018)
Using OER? Tell us about it!
Subject Librarian
Impact of OER Adoption
- The Open Education Group's "Review Project"The project provides access to all known empirical research on the impact of OER adoption, including studies focused on efficacy and perception.
References
Ernst, D., Cohen, S. F., & Kaufman, S. (Sept. 2018). Open Textbook Network: PALCI master training deck [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rOlGbzTXB11WbHuxFY0BCZhaG0doWYqDXScyPL4FNlk/edit#slide=id.g7e53c65f682c6f5c_103
Florida Virtual Campus. (2012). 2012 Florida student textbook survey. Retrieved from http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/pdf/2012_Florida_Student_Textbook_Survey.pdf
SPARC. (2018). Open education. Retrieved from https://sparcopen.org/open-education/
Wiley, D. (2014, Mar. 5). The access compromise and the 5th R. Message posted to https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221
Each of the works above, except Florida Virtual Campus, is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Florida Virtual Campus is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license.
This guide contains a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It is freely available for modification through the LibGuides community.