Skip to Main Content

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources (OER)

See also the guide, Exploring Textbook Alternatives, for Library and Low Cost resources.

“Open educational resources” means high-quality teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released pursuant to an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others, and may include other resources that are legally available and free of cost to students.  Open educational resources include, but are not limited to, full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, faculty-created content, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. --California Education Code, Section 78052 (b) (4)

Self-Paced Courses on OER

The ASCCC OERI has developed two self-paced courses to prepare faculty who are planning to develop/curate OER. Please note that Accessibility Basics provides an overview of accessibility intended for all faculty – it is not limited to accessibility in the context of OER.

Important: All courses are offered via Canvas and set so that you can “self-enroll”. Please be sure that you are logged into your home instance of Canvas before attempting to access any PDC course. If this does not work – or you are not faculty – please contact us for assistance.

Register for ASCCC OERI – OER Basics

OER Basics serves as an introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) providing faculty with new options for selecting textbooks and other resources so they can make the best decisions for their students. At the end of this self-paced course successful participants will be able to:

  • Properly identify the creative commons (CC) license on a resource and describe how this resource can and cannot be used.
  • Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of open resources using current research in the field as evidence.
  • Research, analyze and review repositories of open resources.
  • Effectively search for open resources and post reviews in an OER repository.
  • Create an open resource by remixing multiple existing resources and designate a license to this new resource based on the licenses of multiple resources use.

Register for ASCCC OERI – Accessibility Basics

This course was designed with two compatible goals. It is intended to:

  • introduce all faculty to the basics of developing accessible content and
  • provide faculty who will be developing and/or curating open educational resources (OER) with an understanding of accessibility basics.

OERI News

News and happenings from OER initiatives. The OERI Representative for SDCC is Melanie Nakaji.

 

What Does "Open" Mean?

Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources

The terms "open content" and "open educational resources" describe any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms like "open source") that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:

  • 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)

This material was created by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/. 

Quick Start Here

Here are some of the starting points for getting involved in the OER community:

More About OER

Click the menu in the top right-hand corner of the first video to see a list of short videos on the following:

  1. What is OER?
  2. How can OER help educators?
  3. How can I find OER?
  4. What does the research say about OER?
  5. What is an open license and how does it work?
  6. Why OER?

From Open Educational Resources (OER) libguide by Heather Blicher

The Open Education Group's Review Project, led by John Hilton III, is "an ongoing review of empirical research on the impacts of OER adoption" that "...gathered articles that focus on the efficacy of OER or teacher/student perceptions of such resources in actual practice. We have limited our studies to those in which OER were the primary learning resource(s) and were compared against traditional learning resources; in addition, the study needed to include at least 50 participants." Click the link below to go to the list of studies.

Author, License & Attribution

Guide Author: Sandra V. Pesce, PhD ~ Librarian/Professor Electronic Resources ~ spesce@sdccd.edu ~ 619-388-3245

  All original content in this libguide, Open Educational Resources (OER),  is licensed by Sandra Pesce under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 3rd-party content including, but not limited to images and linked items, are subject to their own license terms.   Portions of this guide content are reused from Northern Virginia Community College's Open Educational Resources (OER) libguide, for which this author gratefully acknowledges librarian Heather Blicher's permission to copy.

custom footer