The term “Open Education Resource” was first coined at a UNESCO forum on the impact of on Open Courseware in Higher Education in 2002. Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone and available under a license that allows users to use, remix, improve and redistribute. Sharing ideas and resources and collaborating on projects as part of a community has been key to the open education movement.

Video: “An Introduction to Open Educational Resources” by Abbey Elder is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International license.

What can you do with OER?

Faculty bring OER to life. Open educational resources are innovative not just because they are free, but because of how teachers adopt and creatively adapt them, bringing them to life in the classroom to reach every student. OERs enhance teaching and learning experiences by their inherent characteristics commonly referred to collectively as the 5 Rs of OER.

Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
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 material 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)

"The 5 R's" from "Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources Links to an external site" by David Wiley, published in his blog opencontent.org, licensed under a CC-BY license. "Image of 5 R's" licensed CC-0 public domain.

What are the benefits of creating and using open educational resources?

Benefits for students

Using OER can provide tremendous cost savings for students and may impact student success and completion rates positively. Reducing costs for students is a principal motivation for schools promoting the use of OER.

"From January 2006 to July 2016, the Consumer Price Index for college tuition and fees increased 63 percent, compared with an increase of 21 percent for all items. Over that period, consumer prices for college textbooks increased 88 percent and housing at school (excluding board) increased 51 percent." - US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Video: A Review of the Effectiveness & Perceptions of Open Educational Resources As Compared to Textbooks [4:40] is licensed CC-BY

The cost of textbooks can be a financial burden on students, which not only affects student success but could also delay graduation for students who are taking fewer classes per term because of that cost, further increasing financial costs for students over time. OER provide students with day-one access to free course materials, and research reviewed by the Open Education Group shows that most students perform as well or better using OER course materials compared with students using traditional textbooks.

OER allow students to have learning materials right from the start of their courses. This is not a negligible point, as the results of the Florida Virtual Campus’ 2016 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey show: 66.6 percent of surveyed students did not purchase a required textbook because of the cost, which these students felt resulted in them earning a poor grade (37.6 percent) or earning a failing grade (19.8 percent). 47.6 percent of students surveyed also indicated that they have taken fewer courses occasionally or frequently, 45.5 percent did not register for a course, 26.1 percent dropped a course, and 20.7 percent withdrew from a course because of the cost of required textbooks.

The Florida survey was updated in 2018, and here is a summary of those results, and a full 2018 survey report.

Supplementary content: OER in Research from National University with many recent studies on OER.

Chart: Impact of Textbook Costs on Students by Florida Virtual Campus from 2016 Florida Virtual Campus Student Textbook & Course Materials Survey (Links to an external site.) is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (Links to an external site.)

Benefits for educators

Faculty enjoy more freedom in selecting course materials and can customize these materials to fit the specific needs of their students and the goals of their classes.
Students will have the materials they need for class.
OER provides clearly defined rights to users, so educators are not faced with interpreting copyright and fair use.
Faculty don't have to deal with meaningless publisher textbook revisions.

Text is from the Community College Consortium for Open Education webpage, "Why Open Education?" distributed under a CC BY license.

Challenges of using OER

male juggler balancing juggling club on his forehead There are many benefits to using OER in the classroom; however, there are also some drawbacks. The biggest challenge that instructors face when adopting OER is best encapsulated by the phrase “availability may vary.”

Subject availability

Many of the largest OER projects funded over the past twenty years targeted high cost, high impact courses to save students money. Because of this, most of the OER available today are for general education courses such as Psychology, Biology, and Calculus.

This does not mean that there are no OER available for specialized subject areas or graduate-level courses; however, there are more resources to choose from for instructors who teach Introduction to Psychology than for those who teach Electronic Systems Integration for Agricultural Machinery & Production Systems.

Note: This is beginning to change as more institutions begin publishing OER through regional and institutional grant programs.

Image: "Hunky juggler 02 - Royal Hanneford Circus - Westchester NY - 2013-02-16" by Tim Evanson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Format & material type availability

As with subject availability, the format and types of OER that have been developed over time have largely been targeted at high enrollment courses which could see substantial cost savings for students. There are many open textbooks available today, but fewer options for ancillary materials. You can find lecture slides, notes, and lesson plans online, but ancillary content such as homework software and test banks are harder to find.^[11]

Time & Support Availability

Although the other challenges to OER use are inherent to the resources themselves, this final drawback is a concern for you as a user and creator. It takes time and effort to find OER that might work for your course, and if you want to create and publish new resources, that takes even more time.

What are open licenses and why are they important to open educational resources?

To facilitate robust and engaging learning experiences, educators and students rely upon the ability to freely exchange ideas and educational content. But that’s not always easy to do because most publishers and authors of educational materials explicitly restrict your ability to copy, share and modify these resources through copyright, passwords, or other means. Open licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses (also known as "CC licenses"), clearly state how the author wants you to use their materials, and give you the right to freely copy, modify, adapt, and build upon those materials for your desired use.

"Free" does not equal "open"

The Internet is full of publicly available "free" material, but only a tiny fraction of it is openly licensed. Anyone, educators or the general public, can publish a resource on a website, but without an open license applied to it, material in the United States is automatically copyrighted, restricting its use.

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