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Open Educational Resources (OER) Guide

Benefits of OER

Benefits for learners using OER

  • reduction of costs (e.g. textbooks)
  • accessing to/applying knowledge in a wider context than a course
  • freedom of access in time (preferred time and date) and space (e.g. at work/home/on placement)
  • enhanced opportunities for learning
  • support for learner-centered, self-directed, peer-to-peer and social/informal learning approaches
  • opportunity to test out course materials before enrolling and compare with other similar courses
  • opportunities to be involved in OER initiatives either through contributing towards OER development, testing or evaluation, marketing activities, or acting as an ambassador for OER with other learners or staff

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

Learning with OER

This video from Lumen Learning shows how students can be more successful in classes that use OER than classes that use commercially published textbooks. 

OER for Learners

Watch this YouTube video from intheacademia to find out more about the value of OER for learners. 

Open Education Matters

This video demonstrates how OER can remove barriers of high cost and out-of-date materials.

Find OER for Learners

Find University-Level Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

License

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. 

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