What are OERs?“OER” stands for Open Educational Resource. These are educational materials such as: textbooks, problem sets, assessments, slide decks, videos, lesson plans, study guides, handouts, info graphics, and other educational content that can be used for free and without permission. OERs are resources published under an open license, such as Creative Commons. Best of all these resources can be freely adapted to help your students meet the learning outcomes for your course. For more information check out this short video.
Why Use OERs for Teaching and Instruction?Use of Open Educational Resources (OER) helps to reduce the cost of educational resources for students, staff, and faculty while supporting high-quality teaching, learning, and research and to increase participation in a learning environment that values global sharing of knowledge. The use, creation, and adaption of OERs in teaching and instruction provide enhanced opportunities for self-learning at home, they can act as engaging tools to develop digital literacy skills for: searching, reusing, recreating, disseminating, branding, networking.
Use of OERs can also tie your teaching into the strategic goals on campus. These resources can be Indigenized, to advance Indigenous achievement. They can incorporate digital tools to help evaluate student success. They foster sustainable growth by encouraging digital learning materials, and curb the increasing cost of instructional materials. They can be used to cultivate strategic partnerships as you can invite alumni and industry partners to contribute to adapting OERs. Open Education Manitoba - Campus Manitoba launched the Manitoba Open Textbook Initiative in 2015. The goal of the initiative is to make higher education more accessible by reducing students costs through the use of openly licensed textbooks in Manitoba. You can view one of our sessions on OER with Campus Manitoba here.
What can you do with an OER?Open Educational Resources allow you for free and without requesting permission or worrying about copyright clearances allow you to perform the 5 below actions:
Retain – You can keep OER’s as long as you like.
Reuse – You have unlimited reuse of the resource.
Revise – You can adapt or modify the resource to fit your instructional needs and those of your students.
Remix – You can combine OERs or elements of them to make a new resource.
Redistribute – You can share the work with your students and other educators.
Where Can I Find Open Textbooks to adopt and/or adapt?Open Education Manitoba - Campus Manitoba launched the Manitoba Open Textbook Initiative in 2015. The goal of the initiative is to make higher education more accessible by reducing students costs through the use of openly licensed textbooks in Manitoba.
Open Textbook Library - The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality.
Open Stax - We publish high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print. OpenStax is a nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University, and it's our mission to give every student the tools they need to be successful in the classroom.
Where can I get Other OER content?MerLot - This repository is one of the biggest and more famous places to find and share teaching resources containing animations, assessments, learning objective repository, quizzes, tutorials, and open access journal articles.
The Open Library – The home of open educational resources in Ontario.
OER Commons - OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum. This resource contains Labs, assessments, case studies, data sets, lesion plans and more.
Oasis - Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 97 different sources, for videos, podcasts, course materials, interactive simulations, open books and more…
