Open Educational resources (OER) are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.
- OER Awareness SurveyHelp us gain a better understanding of Whitworth's knowledge and use of Open resources by completing this short survey.
- Get librarian assistance with OERDon't know where to start? Can't find what you're looking for? Need help evaluating or adapting the content?
Reach out to the librarian team here!
Open Licensing
What does it mean to be an openly licensed educational material? Textbooks, lesson plans, workbooks, presentations, and other course items can all be OER so long as the author allows the following when distributing:
- Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
- Reuse - the right to use the content in settings like classes, study groups, on websites, in videos, etc.
- Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
- Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
- Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
Thinking about adopting OER?
Start your search or browse what's possible:
- Digital Public Library of AmericaMore than 3 million images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.
- MerlotThe MERLOT Collection is made up of over 40,000 materials in 20 different material type categories and growing. Employs a thorough peer review process.
- OER CommonsA digital public library and collaboration platform that offers openly licensed lectures, textbooks, full courses, games and assessments for K-12 and higher ed. Basic and advanced search by subject education level, and standard.
- Open Education ConsortiumNot a content provider. The Open Education Consortium in collaboration with MERLOT offers a search engine for OER.
- OpenStaxFree, peer-reviewed college textbooks in math, science, social sciences, and business.
- Open Textbook LibraryOpen Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks. Browse by subject.
- Washington 45Materials for a list of courses offered by Washington community and technical colleges that satisfy up to 45 credits of general education requirements.
Evaluate OER in much the same way you would other materials for your courses.
- Does this OER cover the content you'd like your students to learn in this course or module?
- How accessible is this content? Will it be accessible for your students, or is it too technical? Or is it robust and challenging enough for your students?
- How can you use the content? Verify the license that the resource is under. Can you remix or revise the OER as long as it isn't for commercial purposes? Who do you have to recognize if you use it? Will you be able to do so? For more help with this, please contact the library.
- Once you determine how you can use the OER, what would you like to do with it? Does only a portion of it apply to your class? Would you possibly want to combine this OER with another OER or resource? Does the library have access to articles that could act as supplemental readings?
- As you collect more OER and other resources, save them in a central location. Take note of how you envision using them. Align these resources with the learning objectives and weekly lessons on your syllabus in order to identify gaps.
(Source: University of Illinois Libraries Evaluate OER site)
Evaluation Checklists and Tools:
- Rubrics for Evaluating Open Education ResourcesEight rubrics for the evaluation of OER created by ACHIEVE.org. Whether using these specific rubrics or not the descriptions are helpful for considering materials.
- iRubric: Evaluating OER rubricQuestions to ask about the OER you are thinking of using.
- Accessibility ToolkitThe goal of this accessibility toolkit, 2nd edition, is to provide resources for each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open textbook—one that is free and accessible for all students.
When you're reusing or remixing OER, you will want to know how to properly cite other people's work. All Creative Commons licenses come with the expectation of attribution, even if you are adapting content. In your citation, be sure to include:
- Title of the work
- Author of the work
- Source of the work (for example, a URL)
- License under which the work is distributed (for example, CC BY)
- Link to the license used for the work (for instance, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
(Source: Based on University of Oregon Open Educational Resources site by Rayne Vieger and Genifer Snipes)
- Open Attribution BuilderA tool from Open Washington for generating Creative Commons & Public Domain attributions for resources.
Open Pedagogy Resources
- Open Pedagogy NotebookA resource for educators interested in learning more about Open Pedagogy. Browse through the examples, which include both classroom-tested practices and budding ideas, or consider contributing examples of your own experiments with open pedagogy.
- Hybrid PedagogyHybrid Pedagogy (an OA journal) calls itself a community, a conversation, a collaboration, a school, and a journal. It is a place to discuss critical digital pedagogy by advocating for students and fostering awareness of academic hierarchies. Hybrid Pedagogy is centered on praxis — the blend of theory and practice that develops with experience and reflection.
- Opening Up Education(eBook) The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge
Virtues of Openness by ISBN: 1594516863Pub. date: 2012The movement toward greater openness represents a change of philosophy, ethos, and government and a set of interrelated and complex changes that transform markets altering the modes of production and consumption, ushering in a new era based on the values of openness: an ethic of sharing and peer-to-peer collaboration enabled through new architectures of participation.
