Library Research Guides: OER: Open Educational Resources at SC4: Home

Open at SC4 is the institutional willingness and ability to aid its instructors in utilizing Open Educational Resources and moving their courses in a more open direction if they wish to do so.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others."

From The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

OER allow users to:

Retain -- users have the right to make, archive, and own copies of the content
Reuse -- content can be reused in its unaltered form
Revise -- content can be adapted, adjusted, modified, and altered
Remix -- original or revised content can be combined with other content to create something new
Redistribute -- copies of the content can be shared with others in its original, revised or remixed form.

From Lansing Community College OER

Open Education: The Moral, Business, & Policy Case for OER
Presented Feb. 2017 by Dr. Cable Green, Director of Open Education at Creative Commons.
Capetown Open Education Declaration
It's been ten years since the Capetown Open Education Declaration.
We're still going strong. Here are ten directions to move Open Education forward.

The OER Movement

Many community colleges have successfully implemented OER in the classroom, in many cases completely replacing the textbook with open textbooks, articles, websites, and tools.

Organizations dedicated to shared information access and other Higher Ed organizations have a wealth of resources explaining, supporting, and sharing OERs.

CCCOER
Our mission is to expand access to education by promoting awareness and adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER).
OER Commons (MCO Hub)
The MCO created the Michigan Colleges Online Hub for our member institutions as a way to reduce costs for students, increase student success and completion, and allow for inter-institutional collaboration with faculty. Our Institutions are creating, sharing, and collaborating on high-quality OER for use in today's classrooms. Join a group and begin contributing today.
OER Commons SC4 Group
Join the SC4 Group for OER Commons and save, contribute, and share OER!

How can it benefit SC4 Students?

OER Adoption Impact Calculator
The OER Adoption Impact Explorer helps you understand some of the impacts of adopting OER instead of commercial textbooks. Change the values to match data from your institution to see how OER adoption can benefit your students and institution. Provided by Lumen Learning

Utilizing resources such as OER can substantially reduce college costs for students. At Lansing Community College a total of 2,950 students enrolled in 93 sections of 11 courses saved an estimated $295,000 in textbook costs in a single semester. Of these students, 117 were polled with 97% of respondents stating that the quality of the open text used in their course was about the same or better than the quality of the text used in other courses in which they were enrolled.

Source: MI-ALA 2016 Conference Presentation http://nmc.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=21833619

Arguments for OER in Higher Ed

Find more arguments, research, case studies, etc. on the OER Research tab.

Attribution

This guide was originally authored by Kendra Lake for SC4 Library; edited and updated 1/2021 by Hayley Bommarito