Open Education Resources Updated

Open Educational Resources, or OER's are freely accessible education materials that are licensed, usually under a Creative Commons license, so that users may retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute. Using OER's in your classes is not considered a violation of copyright laws. In most OER's, the original author should be given attribution credit though. 

The OER Starter Kit from Iowa State University provides an excellent introduction to OER's

"An Introduction to Open Educational Resources" by Abbey Elder is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

Not sure if students can succeed when they use open educational resources? Take a look at some recent studies: 

• Fixing the Broken Textbook Market, 3rd Edition (Feb. 2021) from U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group). Includes data and information about barriers students face in regards to high textbook costs. Has key findings about the impact of the pandemic on students' access to course materials.


• A research study, "The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics",  published in the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, concluded that students in classes utilizing OER textbooks tended to have higher grades and the number of DFW grades decreased in those classes when compared to classes utilizing traditional textbooks


• Open Education Group also has a list of publications about the benefits of using OER's in the classroom

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

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This guide has been adapted from guides from the Portland Community College, the University of Pittsburgh, and Austin Community College and the University of Nevada Reno