With textbook prices rising much faster than the cost of inflation, open education resources are an important alternative to help counteract these costs. Open educational resources include textbooks, journals, video and audio files, archival material, and other supplemental material that is available through open licensing. Not only are these resources important for their usefulness in the classroom, but they offer a publishing alternative that allows for scholarly research to be available to the widest possible community.
Open educational resources are not equivalent to free materials. While OER are free, they also include Creative Commons (CC) licensing that allow for reuse, repackaging and/or remixing, with attribution to the source creator. There are multiple levels of CC licensing. It is important to be aware of the CC license attributed to a resource because not all uses are allowed by all licenses. You can find the different types of CC licenses online.
This research guide introduces high quality OER that are availabe for use in courses.
If you're interested in learning more about OER for use either in your class or as a publishing option, please contact a reference librarian.
