The following video offers a very brief introduction to OER.

What is OER?

Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone and available under a license that allows users to use, remix, improve and redistribute. Sharing ideas and resources and collaborating on projects as part of a community is key to the Open Education movement.

What can you do with OER?

Teachers bring OER to life. Open educational resources are innovative not just because they are free, but because of how teachers adopt and creatively adapt them, bringing them to life in the classroom in order to reach every student.

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 a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
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)

"The 5 R's" from Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources by David Wiley, published in his blog opencontent.org, licensed under a CC BY license.

What are the benefits of creating and using Open Educational Resources?

OER offer financial and pedagogical benefits.

improving student performance and satisfaction
increasing access to educational materials for a wider range of learners, including those underserved by traditional educational opportunities
giving instructors the flexibility to customize materials specifically for their students' needs
encouraging educators to engage in critical reflection of educational resources
helping students, districts, and educational institutions save money

The following videos describe some of the benefits of OER.

Learn more about current research on the impact of OER at the OER Research Hub website.

OER is any material with an open license used for teaching or learning

That means activities, curriculum, lesson or unit plans, professional development, textbooks, stories, tools, videos, wiki, full courses, podcasts, a syllabus... and more!

types of oer

▹▹▹ See examples of different kinds of resources on page: Tools for Authoring Open Materials

What are open licenses and why are they important to Open Educational Resources?

In order to facilitate robust and engaging learning experiences, educators and students rely upon the ability to freely exchange ideas and educational content. But that’s not always easy to do because most publishers and authors of educational materials explicitly restrict your ability to copy, share and modify these resources through copyright, passwords, or other means. Open licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses (also known as "CC licenses"), clearly state how the author wants you to use their materials, and give you the right to freely copy, modify, adapt, and build upon those materials for your desired use.

These licenses appear on anything considered an OER.

Note: most definitions of OER require the ability to make modifications, in which case the no derivatives (ND) licenses would not be considered OER.

Check your knowledge

First knowledge check question by William Meinke, published in the online book University of Hawai'i OER Training Course and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

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Go to the next page to get an introduction to searching for OER.