Open Educational Resources
What are OERs?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials made freely available for use in teaching, learning, or research.
OER materials can include:
- Textbooks
- Course readings
- Simulations
- Games
- Syllabi
- Quizzes and other assessment tools
Each resource is issued under a license that spells out how it can be used. Some materials may only be used in their original form; in other cases, learning resources can be modified, remixed, and redistributed.
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Suffolk University OER LibGuide
The Sawyer Library compiled an excellent guide for finding open educational resources. This includes online instructional materials, textbooks, books, journals, images, and videos. We encourage you to talk to our librarians to see what they suggest for your specific course needs.
Why does this matter?
There are several advantages of using OERs, for both students and instructors. First, it allows instructors to revise and remix content so they can present instructional materials exactly how they choose. For instance, rather than having students read a chapter from a copyrighted textbook, instructors could select an open textbook, pick and choose sections that are most pertinent for their lessons, and copy the materials into a learning management system or document (with attribution). The instructor could intersperse videos, audio recordings, or interactive materials from other open resources directly into this text. This allows for much more flexibility in how content is presented to students.
Also, open educational resources remove potential price barriers for students, giving them immediate access to instructional materials from the very first day of class. Some students opt to not purchase textbooks due to the high price; using OERs will prevent students from missing any educational content.
The following video from the Council of Chief State School Officers highlights the following benefits of using OERs:
- Equal access to high-quality resources
- Open community for scholars
- Student and instructor empowerment
- Decreased college costs
- Providing supports for all learners
What should I consider when selecting OERs?
The prompts below are intended to help you reflect on a new OER that you’re hoping to use in your course. There are no right or wrong answers here. The questions will encourage you to think critically about the resource, explore its possibilities, and maybe even take some risks.
Answer these questions to the extent and in a way that feels useful to you. The end product might be complex and a little messy – but so is learning!
Accessibility
- Is the content organized in a way that feels clear and intuitive? How will you know if your students feel the same way?
- Are there multiple ways for students to access the content? For example, can text be read aloud? Can you caption videos? Can you add alt text to images? Can you increase the font size?
- What barriers to learning could this resource impose?
- List everyone you can talk to if you need help meeting or anticipating student access needs. Suffolk’s Office of Disability Services can be a great resource here!
Relevance and applicability
- Can this resource amplify curiosity and joy in your students’ learning experience? Will the resource excite, interest, and engage them in the subject?
- Can this resource help students make progress towards the learning objectives? If so, which ones?
- What do students need to know to make the best use of this resource?
Opportunities for deeper learning
- Does the resource provide opportunities for students to think critically about the content?
- Can this resource help students connect the course content to the world they live in, the material circumstances influencing them, and their education?
- Does this resource reflect the experiences of people like your students and people who are not like them?
Accuracy
- Who might have a different perspective on the information in this resource? Whose voice is missing, left out, or not prioritized in this work?
- Is there a corporate entity that supports this resource?
Featured OERs
Examples of OERs
Click on the images to explore
Additional resources
Where can I learn more about OERs?
You may want to start by checking out the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation’s publication, “Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources.”
UMass Amherst and Tacoma Community College both offer helpful OER guides.
Other great resources include “7 Things You Should Know About Open Educational Resources” and “Models of Open Educational Resources” from EDUCAUSE.
Open digital libraries
Library of Congress Collections: Library of Congress digital collections are available for use by the public. The Library provides one of the largest bodies of noncommercial high-quality content on the Internet. By providing these materials online, those who may never come to Washington can gain access to the treasures of the nation’s library.
National Science Digital Libraries (NSDL) for STEM courses:
- NSDL is the National Science Foundation’s online library of resources and collections for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and research.
- Resources available through NSDL include images, video, audio, animations, software, datasets, and text documents such as lesson plans and journal articles.
- Use of the NSDL website and related search and reference services is completely free, as are the majority of the resources discoverable through NSDL. However, some of the resource providers who make their materials accessible through NSDL do require a login, or a fee-based membership or that users purchase the complete version of a resource.
National Libraries of Virtual Manipulative (NLVM) for Math courses: NLVM is an NSF supported project that developed a library of uniquely interactive, web-based virtual manipulatives or concept tutorials, mostly in the form of Java applets, for mathematics instruction (K-12 emphasis).
Open multimedia resources under Creative Commons
- AcademicEarth hosts educational videos and allows anyone to freely access instructions from scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. It offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1,300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. For example, the famous lecture series from Dr. Michael Sandel, Harvard University – Justice.
- Open Textbooks: public domain or under a Creative Commons license. Open Textbooks is a project with the mission of driving awareness, adoption, and affordability of open textbooks. The focus is on community colleges and lower division of four-year institutions. An open textbook is an integrated course-associated learning tool that is in the public domain or has been open-licensed by the copyright holder to permit re-use without the necessity of asking permission of the copyright holder.
- FlatWorld: FlatWorld provides low-cost textbooks complete with a homework system, test banks, instructor manuals, and PowerPoint lectures.
- Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application. Many images can be used under Creative Commons licenses.
- Khan Academy offers over 3,000 free education video resources for anyone. They cover a wide range of topics in math, biology, chemistry, physics, finance, history, and more. Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long.
- MERLOT offers over 30,000 open multimedia resources designed for faculty and students of higher education for learning and online teaching.
- MIT OpenCourseWare: 2,000 MIT courses are open to the public.
- TED brings inspiring talks available to the world for free. More than 900 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks are subtitled in English, and many are subtitled in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.
- WGBH Forum Network is a public media service of WGBH. The online library contains thousands of video and audio lectures from the world’s foremost scholars, authors, artists, scientists, policymakers, and community leaders, available to the public for free.
- YouTube Learning is a hub that aggregates videos from several educational sources.
- Creative Commons enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools and maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.
You may also want to investigate OpenStax, a site out of Rice University that makes available modules for free use. The only requirement is that you cite Creative Commons on the material. The OpenStax About Us page gives a great explanation of the notion of educational modularity.
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