Open Education Resources

What are Open Education Resources, or OER?

OER are freely and publicly available teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

AKA they are FREE tools, books, and resources that we can use, change, and share with others!

How and where can I search for Open Education Resources?

There are many online platforms that aggregate and organize OER and make them easily searchable by keyword and type.

OER Commons is the largest and allows you to search by subject and filter based on resource type.

OpenStax has a collection of OER textbooks.

MERLOT has curated teaching materials.

You can also search for OER on Google Advanced Search by doing the following:

Using Google Advanced Search to find OER
On the Google Advanced Search page, scroll to the bottom and look for the "usage rights" field. (Links to an external site.)
Change the "usage rights" field to "free to use, share or modify" or "free to use, share or modify, even commercially" depending on what type of license you want.
Use the other fields to plug in key words and to narrow your results.
Hit the "Advanced Search" button.
The results page should show only Creative Commons resources. Make sure to verify exact license type and terms of use.

Some OERs to Explore

GENERAL
- - OER Commons: https://oercommons.org/
  - CK-12: https://www.ck12.org/teacher/
WORLD LANGUAGES
- - Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL): https://coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/about-coerll/
STEM
- - National Science Digital Library: https://oercommons.org/hubs/NSDL
  - OER Commons STEM: https://oercommons.org/hubs/stem-literacy
VIDEO/MUSIC/MULTIMEDIA
- - CC Mixter: https://ccmixter.org/
PRIMARY SOURCES
- - Library of Congress Digital Collections: https://www.loc.gov/collections/world-digital-library/about-this-collection/
  - New York Public Library Digital Collections: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/
HUMANITIES
- - Bookshare: https://www.bookshare.org/
  - Directory of Open Access Journals: https://doaj.org/
  - Open Library of Humanities: https://www.openlibhums.org/

How to Assess the Quality of OERs?

The nonprofit organization Achieve has created a rubric for assessing the quality of Open Education Resources. Their rubric asses OER in the following areas:

Rubric I. Degree of Alignment to Standards
Rubric II. Quality of Explanation of the Subject Matter
Rubric III. Utility of Materials Designed to Support Teaching
Rubric IV. Quality of Assessment
Rubric V. Quality of Technological Interactivity
Rubric VI. Quality of Instructional and Practice Exercises
Rubric VII. Opportunities for Deeper Learning
Rubric VIII. Assurance of Accessibility

Achieve partnered with OER Commons to develop an online evaluation tool to apply this rubric. Every resource available on OER Commons now contains an "Evaluate Resource" button that will direct users to the evaluation tool.

Page updated

Report abuse