Open Educational Resources and Affordable Learning: OER Basics

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. 

Get Involved

Calls for OER proposals, conferences, and more are now updated in our OER Opportunities blog here. You can subscribe to the blog to get the updates in your email. 

Read More

It’s Time for Open Educational Resources, Inside Higher Ed, 4/21/21

The Impact of OER at the University, The TECH Edvocate, 5/6/21

International Journal of Open Educational Resources (open access)

"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. [5Rs Image by Ed Beck/CC BY 4.0, based on David Wiley's 5Rs]

If you want a crash course in "Understanding OER" and more, check out the SUNY OER Community Courses: