What are Open Educational Resources?
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Time needed to complete this module: 20 minutes
Learning Objectives:
- Define Open Educational Resources (OER)
- Discuss OER’s importance in higher education
- Find OER materials for your course or academic work
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain and have been released under an open license that permits access, use, repurposing, reuse and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions (Atkins, Brown & Hammond, 2007).
Citation:
Atkins, D. E., Brown, J. S., & Hammond, A. L. (2007). A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities. Report to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 84.
OER can be used to add content to courses. OER follows 5 Rs:
– Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
– 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 open content 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)
OER materials are often created with Creative Commons Licenses, which allows creators to make their own works accessible and reusable. The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools offer an alternative to the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Their tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work.
From Creative Commons Licenses
Open Access usually refers to scholarly peer-reviewed journal literature (research articles) available online, but some digital books and theses can also be shared via Open Access. Please check out the UNCG Libraries Scholarly Communications guide for more information about Open Access at UNCG.
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