What are OER?
Open Educational Resources are materials shared in the public domain or with a permissive open license, usually a Creative Commons (CC) license. You may be familiar with Open Access scholarship, which is also generally shared with a CC license, allowing users to access, download, and distribute scholarship without violating copyright restrictions. OER licenses incorporate these same freedoms but go even further, allowing users to:
- Retain - maintain your own copies of a work
- Reuse - use a work in multiple different ways (in the classroom, on Canvas, in a publication)
- Revise - modify the work to suit your needs
- Remix - combine the work with other content
- Redistribute - share copies of the work (including newly revised/remixed iterations)
It is this freedom to adapt and create (and distribute) new materials that distinguishes OER. Instructors who are generally happy with a textbook but have reservations about particular figures can revise/replace those figures. OER texts can be updated to reflect changes without requiring students to purchase a new edition. Entire texts can be downloaded and changed to a dyslexic-friendly font before being uploaded back into Canvas. Instructors teaching unconventional topics or interdisciplinary courses where standard textbooks do not exist can select chapters, assignments, and articles from other sources and assemble them into a new textbook product to distribute to students--all without worrying about copyright infringement (so long as they abide by the terms of the CC licenses applied to the source materials).