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OER: Open Educational Resources at SC4

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 Image

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.

From Lansing Community College OER

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.

How can it benefit SC4 Students?

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  

Attribution

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