Open Educational Resources

Midway University's Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation's Open Educational Resources (OER) LibGuide aims to address the following question:

What can we do to improve student learning and faculty teaching materials by making them increasingly:

1. Accessible - available in multiple formats, compatible with multiple devices, as well as ADA compliant;

2. Affordable - ensuring that no student is excluded from access because of financial reasons;

3. High Quality - peer-reviewed, current, authoritative, usable/readable by the intended audience;

4. Flexible/Adaptable - supportive of various faculty teaching and student learning methodologies; 

5. Engaging - encouraging active student engagement with learning materials; and/or

6. Innovative - employing current teaching and learning methodologies and, where relevant, and teaching technical literacy. 

What is OER?

The term Open Educational Resources (OER) has numerous working definitions. These include:

"Teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work". UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware

"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. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

"Digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licenses". Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

"Materials offered freely and openly to use and adapt for teaching, learning, development and research" Commonwealth of Learning

"Educational resources (lesson plans, quizzes, syllabi, instructional modules, simulations, etc.) that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing." WikiEducator project

What types of materials are included in OER?

• textbooks
• readings (ex. articles, blogs or webpages)
• multimedia files (ex. videos)
• software
• assessment tools
• lessons and lesson plans, entire courses (which you may use in their entirety or piece-mail)

View the video below for a description of OER and a summary of research studying the use of OER in higher education

The Open Education movement is built around the 5Rs of Open. These represent the gold standard in openness:

1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content

2. Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in class, in study group, on a public website, in a video)

3. Revise – the right to adapt, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., mashup)

5. 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)

All original content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

All linked-to content adheres to its respective license.