Open Educational Resources

Checklist for Evaluating OER Resources

If you need help finding OER for your courses, please contact your Inclusive Pedagogy Consultants for OER and your friendly librarians. For additional information, please email or call Jess Koshi-Lum, Associate Dean of the Library, jkoshi-lum@rtc.edu, x5678

See our extensive LibGuide: OER Resources

OERs are transforming society

• are educational materials that are freely available for everyone to use.

  • Format: materials in any medium, digital or otherwise

  • Conditions: that either

    • reside in the public domain, or

    • have been released under an open license

  • Nature: which permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

In other words:

• Free books and materials that are cleared of all copyright issues that you get to keep, modify, and distribute.An Open license is a type of license that grants permission to access, reuse and redistribute a work with few or no restrictions

• However there are 6 licenses to manage these resources and these licences have been created by Creative Commons:

Why Open Educational Resources (OER)?

• Textbooks and learning materials cost students approximately $1,200 per year.

• According to the Chronicle of Higher Education

• , 7 in 10 students didn't purchase a textbook because it was too expensive.

• One in five college students has skipped or deferred a class due to the price of the required learning resources.

• The cost of textbooks is rising at a rate of 4 times inflation

• 60% of students have delayed purchasing textbooks until they’ve received their financial aid.

Source : Lib Guides : Concordia University , Portland

The Open Education movement is built around the 5Rs of Open [2]

• 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)