Open Educational Resources : Home
OER Tagcloud
Image: UNU-ViE_SCIENTIA, color inverted; CC License: Some Rights Reserved
"Open"?
What does it mean for a resource to be "open" or "open access"?
- free to access
- free of many copyright and licensing restrictions1
What is Open Education?
Education that is comprised of materials that are open access with an emphasis on using the interactive, collaborative environment of the internet.
What are Open Educational Resources?
Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes.2
Examples:
- lesson plans that are open access
- textbooks that are open access
- interactive, collaborative activities that are open access
- images, videos, and audio that are open access
- courses that are open access
1 https://mitpress.mit.edu/index.php?q=books/open-access#
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources
- Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational ResourcesThe Definition of the five R's of open content and what open content works are.
- SPARC Open Education Fact SheetSPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) created a Fact Sheet that explains what Open Education is and how Open Educational Resources work.
- GSA Library Quick Guide to OERsThis infographic is a quick guide to getting started with OERs.
Getting Started
Head over to Creative Commons Licensing and Copyright section, because understanding what licensing options are available to you and how they work to make works "open" is integral to creating or adopting Open Educational Resources for use in your classroom.
What is OER? Videos
A video about how technology is transforming our system of education, generating equal opportunities for all by opening up education resources.
Images in this Guide
The images used in this guide were discovered via Creative Commons searches. Accordingly, each image has been cited/credited according to its specific license. For more information, follow the links below the images, or visit the UW-Madison Libraries' copyright research guide.
