Skip to Main Content

Open Educational Resources (OER)

What is OER?

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license [such as Creative Commons Licenses] that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions" (From UNESCO, n.d).

David Wiley, who is the Chief Officer of Lumen Learning, developed five permissions (commonly referred to as the 5Rs) that users engage with when creating open education content:

  • Retain-users can make, own, and control a copy of the work
  • Revise - users can edit, adapt, modify, or translate a copy of a work
  • Remix – users can combine original or revise content with other resources to create something new (ex. creating a mashup such as a video or textbook)
  • Reuse – users can use an original, revised, or remixed copy of a resource publicly (ex. on a website, in a presentation or class)
  • Redistribute -users can share any versions of the resource with others (ex. post on an online forum, social media, etc. or give it to a friend)

This material is adapted from Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources, which was originally written by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.

Attribution:
Short History of OER by Lillian Hogendoorn & Emily Carlisle-Johnson is licensed under CC BY 4.0 International license.
Here are some helpful resources to provide you with more information about OERs:

BCOER Poster

BC Campus is one of the leading organizations on Open Education Resources in Canada. They have taken an active role in helping to support, adopt, and evolve OER initiatives in post-secondary education in B.C. and are recognized by many other institutions around Canada and globally for their efforts. 

The poster below, created by BC Campus, breaks down everything there is to know about OERs. Please take an in-depth look at it to help better understand the importance and usefulness of OERs.

                                            

Attribution:
BCOER Poster by BCcampus, licensed under CC BY 4.0
chat loading...