Open Education Resources
Simply put, Open Educational Resources (OER) are education materials that can be freely downloaded, edited, and shared to better serve all students.
OER can be shared at no cost and include legal permissions for the public to freely use, share, and build upon the content. The internet was created to share information. It makes it incredibly easy to share and permit multiple readers to read simultaneously. Daivd Wiley offered the example of loaning a a DVD. If you loan someone a DVD, they can watch it where they are, but you can't; however, if you share a YouTube video, any number of people can watch that video at any time.
OER are possible because:
- education resources are for the most part created using digital technologies, and digital resources can be stored, copied, and distributed for little or no cost;
- the internet makes it easy for anyone with access to the web to share digital content; and
- Creative Commons licenses are simple to apply and work within copyright law. These licenses offer a means to retain copyright and legally share education resources with the world.
Examples of open textbooks in a number of disciplines can be found at OpenStax,the Open Textbook Library or the BC Open Textbook Project. Other times, OER are aggregated and presented as digital courseware. To see examples of open courseware, visit the Open Education Consortium and MIT OCW.
A newer participant in the OER realm is eCampus Ontario, "a not-for-profit corporation, is funded by the Government of Ontario to be a centre of excellence in online and technology-enabled learning for all publicly-funded colleges and universities in Ontario." They support the creation of OER and have searchable database of examples and tools https://openlibrary.ecampusontario.ca/
Also soon, you will be able to search the entire Creative Commons, which currently is in beta form and is limited to images, but soon you will also be able to search for OER, as well. When the new CC Search is done, it will search the entire Commons – all of the public domain and CC licensed works on the Internet.
Once you have found resources you wish to use, you may want to make sure that you can in fact mix them together. Public Domain resources are free of copyrights and so are free to mix and adapt. Most creative commons license will have permissive allowances, but the most restrictive of them, the ones that include ND, do not. To see which CC licensed works can be remixed with other CC licensed works, revisit the CC Remix Chart below. Where there is a green check at the intersection of two CC licensed works, you can remix those two works. Where you see a black X, you cannot remix those two CC licensed works.
