What are Open Educational Resources?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are free and openly licensed teaching and learning materials that you can use and adapt in your courses. Think of them as high-quality course components – textbooks, videos, simulations, assignments – available online at no cost to you or your students. This allows you to create a dynamic and engaging learning experience without the burden of expensive traditional course materials.
The 5 Rs of Open
The Open Education movement is built around the 5Rs of Open. These represent the gold standard in openness:
- 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 class, in study group, on a public website, in a video).
- Revise: the right to adapt, 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 (e.g. mashup).
- Redistribute: the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend).
OER at Reynolds
Reynolds Community College Libraries put together an excellent research guide on all things OER. Head on over to their website, Open Educational Resources (OER): Getting Started, to learn all about OER including why we should be using them in our courses, access to searchable databases, OER guides and tools, webinars and trainings, and more.
OER and Affordable Collections & Resources
- VIVA Faculty Textbook Portal - As Virginia’s academic library consortium, VIVA offers faculty open and affordable library resources and services for Virginia higher education students and faculty.
- Merlot - MERLOT stands for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. This resource has thousands of materials, including lesson plans, activities, tutorials and more. Create a username and login to keep track of your favorites.
- OER Commons - OER Commons indexes a wide variety of openly licensed educational materials.
- OpenStax – OpenStax publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks in a broad range of subject areas.
- Open Textbook Library - Includes a broad selection of peer-reviewed and openly-licensed textbooks, including accounting & finance, humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and more.
- Khan Academy - Includes self-paced practice exercises and instructional videos in subjects including math, science, computer programming, history, art history, economics, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit organization.
- Creative Commons Search - Find content you can share, use, and remix.
- Flickr Commons - Free public domain images from all over the world. Flickr Commons’ images contain no known copyright restrictions.
- #WOCinTech - Free photos of women and non-binary people of color working in Tech
- Library of Congress Digital Collections - The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, serving as the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and providing access to a vast collection of materials, including books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts.
- Smithsonian Open Access - Download, share, reuse, and remix millions of images with the CC0, public domain designation.
