Open Educational Resources (OERs) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online to students, educators, and the general public. They include textbooks, quizzes, class exercises, videos, and other learning objects that have been openly licensed so that others can adopt or reuse this material for their own purposes.
To be more specific, when we say that OERs are openly licensed, we mean that they can be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed. In practice this means:
(See OpenContent.org, UNESCO and OER Commons for the above definitions).
For a textbook to be considered open, it must be licensed in a way that grants a baseline set of rights to users that are less restrictive than its standard copyright. A licensor's list of permissions must be clearly stated by the author.
Generally, the minimum baseline rights allow users at least the following:
Many authors also grant rights such as:
Please enroll in the RCC OER Canvas course for continuing updates for training and resources. Amber Casoleri is our OER Liaison.
While library-licensed resources are not OERs, they can be used in conjunction with OERs as a cost-saving measure. The RCC Library licenses resources including eBooks, journal articles, and databases that can be used by RCC faculty and students at no additional cost. We're happy to help you permalink this material into your class shell.