Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by the use of an open license which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere. OER include full courses, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, test banks, software, and any other materials used in education.
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The Open Education movement is built around the 5 R's, a series of rights that instructors have over the open content they use in their classes:
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 (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise: The right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix: The right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new.
Redistribute: The right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others.
This material is based on original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at https://opencontent.org/definition/
OER are openly-licensed, freely available educational resources that can be modified and redistributed by users.
Material Type | Openly Licensed | Freely Available | Modifiable |
---|---|---|---|
Free Web-Based Resources Under Traditional Copyright | No | Yes | No |
Subscription-Based Library Collections | No | Yes* | No |
Open Access Articles & Monographs | Yes | Yes | No** |
*Library materials are free for students and faculty to access, but they are not free for the University.
**Some OA articles & monographs are able to be remixed, but authors often hold back these rights since their main concern is the free distribution of their scholarship, not its adaptation.
Open licenses like Creative Commons licenses are often used to communicate what a user can do with a resource, and what rights its author would like to retain. These licenses give others a variety of permissions, making their use or reuse of your resource a faster and more transparent process. For example, some creators may wish to share their work, but not to allow users to sell adaptations of their work.
The most common CC license is the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY). This license allows users to adapt and reuse content with limited restrictions. The only requirement for reusing a CC BY-licensed work is that any new work created must provide attribution to the original creator and a link to the original work.
For more information, visit Creative Commons .
This guide by Darren Hall at Occidental College is adapted from the excellent guide by Jennifer Beamer at The Claremont Colleges Library. The content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.