Open Educational Resources (OER) Guide

This video from Lumen Learning shares the testimonies of instructors who use OER in their courses. 

Benefits for educators using OER

• student feedback
• open peer review
• reputational benefits and recognition
• efficiency and cultural benefits of collaborative approaches to learning
• interdisciplinary opportunities
• opportunity to reach many learners

(modified and integrated from list available at http://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com)

If you are looking for a more comprehensive introduction to OER, try these OER overviews and starter kits. 

• Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science (Ubiquity Press)

This Open Access textbook explores the history and philosophy of open sources, open education and open science. It addresses many questions that educators may have about OER and discusses the quality of open education resources, open academic journals and open research methods. 

• The OER Starter Kit (Iowa State University Digital Press)

An Open Access textbook for educators and teachers, Abbey Elder's starter kit introduces first-time users and creators of OER to the basics of getting started with OER.

• How to Use Open Educational Resources (Open Washington)

This open, self-paced workshop from Open Washington explores all aspects of OER, including topics like copyright, the public domain, accessibility, and sharing resources. 

• Faculty OER Toolkit (BCcampus)

This video analyzes an article by John Hilton that reviews research on how students perform in courses with OER and courses with traditional textbooks.  

Find the full article here: 

A faculty member provides his perspective on OER in this 12-minute presentation.

Need to use OER for your teaching?

Before using resources for your course, or to reuse and modify them, check the license! 

Creative Commons licenses are a standardized way for authors to grant copyright permissions to a work.

Here are a few resources you can refer to:

• About the Licenses from Creative Commons
• ALA's Copyright for Libraries Guide
• The Creative Commons page of this guide

• Achieve OER Rubriks
  ​Achieve.org has developed eight rubriks to help educators determine if OER meet the standards of their curriculum and to be used in assigning existing OER with an evaluative score in several different areas. 
• OER Evaluation Criteria
  This checklist from Affordable Learning Georgia provides a number of questions to ask to help determine the quality of various aspects of an OER.  

The resources used in this guide are released under Creative Commons Licenses.

This guide was adapted by Sarah Guy from the UNCG Guide "Open Educational Resources" by Beth Bernhardt. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.