About Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open Educational Resources are “Teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open licence that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.” (UNESCO).
You may be familiar with the term Open Access which usually relates to research materials that are free and immediately accessible. Open Access publications differ from OER in that they are not always licensed in a way which permits modifications and adaptations.
Open Educational Resources (OER) can complement the existing paid-for resources on your reading list, and allow you to customise and re-use content in a way that’s not permissible with commercial teaching material. The focus of our guidance is on text-based material such as open textbooks, but other common formats include video and audio.
The “5 Rs” is a framework that encourages educators to capitalise on the unique rights associated with open content. These rights include the ability to:
- Retain: Make and own copies of the work (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
- Reuse: Use the work in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
- Revise: Adapt, modify and translate the work (e.g., translate the content into another language)
- Remix: Combine it with another resource to make a new work (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
- Redistribute: Share the work with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
These rights, or permissions, are made possible through open licensing. For example, Creative Commons open licences help creators of OER retain copyright while allowing others to reproduce, distribute, and make some uses of their work.
Acknowledgements:
David Wiley. Defining the 'open' in open content and open educational resources
Look for Creative Commons licences on material which clearly explain what you can and cannot do with items.