Open Educational Resources (OER)

Building Your Course
Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources are pieces of digital educational content that are shared freely by other educators and institutions in a variety of formats (text, media, images, videos, interactive content, etc.) that allow other educators and institutions to explain particular topics.

The term "Open Educational Resources," or OER for short, was first coined at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware, according to Wikipedia Links to an external site.. AT UNESCO, they defined that open educational resources consist of "teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant conventions and respects the authorship of the work."

While OER resources are wonderful, they are not without usage issues surrounding intellectual property rights. As such, many sharers of OER resources will simply offer their resources completely free under public domain auspices, or under one of several licensing schemes, such as Creative Commons Links to an external site., or the GNU General Public License Links to an external site..

While there aren't always a ton of OER resources in subjects that are part of UC Davis Extension, it never hurts to explore some popular OER Sites to see if there is anything relevant to what you're trying to teach, or that can augment what you're trying to teach, especially for complex subjects that you may not be able to explore as much as you would like in a short class session. Also, it also pays to explore any license used and to do a quick internet search to ensure that the authorship of what you want to use isn't in question.

Popular OER Repositories

Creative Commons Links to an external site. and Google Images (click on Tools > Usage Rights) also both provide ways to search for open resources based on particular licenses, so they're worth checking out as well.