Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open Educational Resources (OER) are:
Learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others (UNESCO, 2021).
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Permissions around use and repurposing are granted by use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere.
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“Open” permissions are defined in terms of the “5R’s”: users are free to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute these educational materials.
5 R's of Open: Free and able to retain, the right to make, own, and control copies of the content; reuse, the right to use the content in a wide range of ways; revise, the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself; remix, the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new; and redistribute, the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others.
Why Use OER?
When faculty use OER, we aren't just saving students money on textbooks: we are directly impacting that students' ability to enroll in, persist through, and successfully complete a course.
UCalgary's Students' Union are advocates of the use open educational resources in undergraduate courses. Read about their ongoing initiatives on campus in the article linked below.
Watch the video below to learn more about OER and how OER can benefit the UCalgary community, including students, faculty, and instructors.
Introduction to OER: Resources for Learning about OER
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SPARC overivew of OERsA good overview of OERs from Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) which is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication.
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OER MythbustingThis resource from the OER policy for Europe project is both a mythbusting guide and a quick introduction to OER.
This guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) unless otherwise noted. Content adapted from work done by BC Campus, Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, George Washington University and more.