CC BY Ron Mader
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.
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.
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
This guide was originally authored by Kendra Lake for SC4 Library; edited and updated by Hayley Bommarito