Open Educational Resources (OER)

What is OER?

What are Open Educational Resources?

"OER are 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. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Additional Reading for OER Beginners

Open Education Consortium
The Open Education Consortium is a great place to start when learning about or searching for OER. It provides a wealth of information as well as some great OER search tools.
OER Handbook for Educators
"Welcome to the world of Open Educational Resources (OER). This handbook is designed to help educators find, use, develop and share OER to enhance their effectiveness online and in the classroom."
OpenContent.org
This is OER Leader David Wiley's homepage that includes his blog, updates and other tools for those interested in using and justifying OER.
EDUCAUSE OER Library
Articles, presentations, and more on OERs from EDUCAUSE.

OER Search Engines

Check out the George Mason University MetaFinder: https://library.gmu.edu/oermetafinder
You can also check out SUNY Genesco: https://oasis.geneseo.edu/

How can I get started with OER?

Contact Mary Hanlin your OER librarian for more help with finding or adopting OER!

hanlinm@tncc.edu or 757.825.3878

Learn the basics of open educational resources with Pathways. To sign up for a Pathways workshop click the email me button to the right. In the mean time, take a look at the open texts for Pathways here: https://courses.candelalearning.com/pathways/

Dig a little deeper into copyright and open licensing, the foundation of OER. Try our copyright training module here: http://tncc.libsurveys.com/Copyright-OER-Module

See how others have done it. Faculty have mapped their course learning outcomes to supporting open materials on the course in the mapping spreadsheets here: http://libguides.tncc.edu/OER/coursemaps

Start looking for OER you can adopt or adapt for your courses. Explore the sources we've listed for open textbooks, open courseware, journals, and other media on this guide!