The best way to get started with Open Educational Resources (OER) is to contact Ed Beck or Jennifer Jensen from the SUNY Oneonta OER Initiative (link at this form).
We can help you adopt, adapt, or create openly licensed, low-cost materials for your courses.
Why use OER?
Reasons to use OER for instructors:
Open Educational Resources (OER) are adoptable -- you can use existing textbooks, lab materials, teaching notes, and more.
OER are adaptable -- you can customize them for your course or teaching style.
OER can be all digital or printed, or offered in both formats as you/your students prefer. They can even be interactive and incorporate graded quizzes or multimedia materials.
OER can be integrated into Blackboard courses.
Reasons to use OER for your students:
OER can lower barriers to and minimize costs of course materials for students.
OER can be retained forever so students don't lose access when their textbook rental ends or they sell their book on the resale market.
What are OER?
"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." (Hewlett Foundation)
The open license of OER is important because it allows you to use materials in more ways than simply reading them. The "5 Rs of OER" illustrates those expanded rights:
Retain OER content indefinitely
Reuse OER as it exists currently
Revise OER by modifying it to fit the needs of your courses
Remix OER by combining open sources
Redistribute OER to students and colleagues
Read more about how open rights work on the Copyright & Creative Commons page of this guide. [Image at left by Ed Beck/CC BY 4.0, based on David Wiley's 5 Rs]
If you want a crash course in "Understanding OER" and more, check out the SUNY OER Community Courses: 
