Introduction: Why OER?
According to the Hewlett Foundation, "OERs 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. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."
In 2019, the Textbook Affordability Committee surveyed students and faculty at ISU and found that 73% of students did not acquire a textbook or course material due to cost, and 89% of students delayed purchasing textbooks or materials because of their cost. OERs remove that barrier, allowing students to come prepared to class on day one.
Additionally, the ability to remix OERs means that you as an instructor can create the best package of course materials for your students. You can customize and update materials as needed, within the bounds of copyright.
(borrowed from Milner's Affordable Course Materials Guide, another wonderful resource for these materials)
OER Journals and Articles
- ISU ReD: Research and eDataIllinois State University's institutional repository supports open and long-term access to the research and scholarship of our faculty, staff, and students. It is comprised of articles, reports, electronic theses and dissertations, data sets, and other digital assets that reflects the diversity of the research, scholarship, and creative activities of the ISU community.
- Directory of Open Access JournalsOnline directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
- Combined Search - AdvancedAll of Milner's search engines (Catalog, Article Search, Combined Search) all allow for filtering down to only open access materials. There will be a filter on the right side of the search results page called Open Access that will only show open materials.
OER Sites
- OER CommonsOER Commons is a repository with 73,000 kinds of OER, along with tools for creating OER, training on how to use OER and the ability to create OER.
- MERLOTMERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. You can search by keywords and content type. Many items are peer reviewed.
- OASISOASIS is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier by searching multiple sources for OER and other open content at once. OASIS currently searches for open content from 79 different sources and contains approximately 330,000 records.
- Mason OER MetaFinderSearch engine from George Mason University shows variety of results – open textbooks, articles, and public domain documents. Think of it as Google for OER!
- nanoHUB.orgnanoHUB.org is the premier open and free platform for computational research, education, and collaboration in nanotechnology, materials science, and related fields
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