Introduction
Welcome to the Open Educational Resources (OER) guide. This guide is designed to help teaching academic staff to find, use, adapt and create OER. For more assistance with locating OER for your course please contact Ask the Library.
What are OER?
Open Education Resources (OER) are designed to make education more inclusive, opening up opportunities to those who otherwise couldn’t afford it by alleviating the high cost of course materials.
OER are educational materials that have been licensed for free use and adaptation (e.g. Creative Commons) or do not have copyright restrictions (e.g. the public domain).
OER include a wide range of resources such as textbooks, teaching and learning materials, images, videos, games, lesson plans, worksheets and assessments.
Why OER matter
Watch the video below to find out how teaching and learning materials are changing and why OER matter!
Video Length: 2:09
The 5 Rs of using OER
When you are using OER, you have the flexibility to:
| 1 | reuse content in its unaltered/verbatim original format |
| 2 | retain copies of content for personal archives or reference |
| 3 | revise content to suit specific needs |
| 4 | remix content with other similar content to create something new |
| 5 | redistribute or share content with anyone else in its original or altered format |
OER benefits & impact
There are many reasons for using OER in teaching and learning:
