What are OER? - Open Educational Resources (OER) - LibGuides at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Open Educational Resources (OER): What are OER?
This guide provides instructor a basic understanding of Open Educational Resources (OER), including how to find, evaluate, use, and adapt OER materials for their own curriculum.
What are OER?
Definition
Important Features
Why Use OER?
Impact
Rights
Find OER
Evaluate OER
Adapt/ Remix OER
Communicating the Value of OER
OER and Copyright
Other Resources
Scholarly Communication and Publishing
Scholarly Communication and Publishing
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Contact:
scpub@library.illinois.edu
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Definition
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.
Source:
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
For more definitions of OER, see the
Creative Commons Wiki
Important Features
OER can either be in the public domain, or under a more lax intellectual property license.
OER can be revised, remixed, added upon, translated, and then shared again to meet different needs.
OER can take many forms, such as: syllabi, lesson plans, videos, software, tests, teaching techniques, group activities, writing prompts, textbooks, learning modules, experiments, simulations, and course designs. There are no platform restraints.
Source:
The Review Project
Why Use OER?
There are many reasons instructors might want to use OER:
Free and Legal to Use, Improve and Share
Save time and energy by adapting or revising resources that have already been created
Tailor educational resources to the specific content for your course
Expand opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching and learning by allowing you to integrate and revise multiple educational resources
Redefine "traditional" learning by incorporating multi-media or scenario-based education
Go beyond the confines of "teaching to the book"
Network and Collaborate with Peers
Access educational resources that have already been "peer reviewed" by other experts in your field
Review or annotation features and texts so other instructors have more in-depth knowledge of the resource and its quality quickly
Make learning and teaching a team project using collaborative platforms
Lower Educational Cost and Improve Access to Information
Reduce the cost of course materials, particularly textbooks so that all students have access and aren't as financially burdened
Find and access information instantly on virtually any topic, on various devices.
Give learners the option of looking at course content openly before enrolling.
Reduce the load students bear, possibly increasing graduation and retention rates
Impact
Hoping to learn more? There have been multiple studies on faculty implementations, misunderstandings, acceptance of, and evaluation of OER.
The Review Project
has curated a number of empirical studies published in scholarly journals on the topic. Their general conclusion is:
Once adopted, OER provide the permissions necessary for faculty to engage in a wide range of pedagogical innovations. In each of the studies reported above, OER were used in manner very similar to the traditional textbooks they replaced. We look forward to reviewing empirical articles describing the learning impacts of open pedagogies.
Rights
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License
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Mar 24, 2026 1:56 PM
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Tags:
oer
open access
open educational resources
scholarly communication