OERs: Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are free to access and have open licensing which allows for unrestricted use and sharing, and often gives permission to edit. Anyone can create an OER, although many are developed by faculty and teachers with support from their institutions or open-focused non-profit publishers, or created through partnership between faculty and students in a course using open pedagogy. OER include any type of materials, including textbooks, lesson plans, test banks, slide decks, activities, games, and whole courses.

The 5 R's of OER: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute are the gold standard of OER. Materials that are openly licensed to ensure the 5 R's give users the ability to:

• Retain: Keep and share your own copy of the material
• Revise: Edit the material
• Remix: Combine the material with other OER materials.
• Reuse: Use whatever you make from the original material
• Redistribute: Share copies of the original content, your revisions, or whatever remixed material you create.

Not all resources in this guide give permissions to revise and remix.

There are three ways to use OER: 

1. Adopt existing resources without making changes. 
2. Adapt or customize existing resources by adding, removing, combining, or editing content
3. Create or Author new resources. 

There is strong evidence that using OER instead of commercially available materials decreases course withdrawal rates with no detrimental impact on student learning (Clinton & Khan, 2019). In a large study that examined the impact of switching to OER on specific student populations, they found a sizable positive effect on OER use on the final grades and decreased DFW rates particularly for Pell grant recipients and non-White students (Colvard et al., 2018).

The Open Education Group provides a compilation of recent meta-analyses on the efficacy and impact of OER.

Benefits to Students:

• Accessible
• Affordable
• Inclusive design
• Retain access to materials

Benefits to Faculty:

• Ability to innovate
• Maintain academic freedom
• Participate in open scholarship
• Support student success

Further reading:

• A pedagogical endeavor: Dr. Robin DeRosa, Plymouth State 
• Beyond free: A social justice vision for open education by Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani [slides from ACRL 2019 Invited presentation]. Check out his great blog re: OER.
• A Critical Take on OER Practices: Interrogating Commercialization, Colonialism, and Content by Sarah Crissinger