Open Educational Resources

Welcome! In this Guide, you'll find:

• Information and resources related to Open Educational Resources (OERs), including
  • How to get started with OERs
  • Repositories and search tools for finding OERs
  • Copyright and licensing information
  • OER initiatives at the University of Jamestown
  • Ideas and inspiration for using open pedagogy in your classroom

What's an OER?

Open Educational Resources, or OERs, are

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.

~ from UNESCO

Why OERs?

SPARC, a global open education coalition, states:

Textbook costs should not be a barrier to education. The price of textbooks has skyrocketed more than three times the rate of inflation for decades. College students face steep price tags that can top $200. ... Using OER solves this problem because the material is free online, affordable in print, and can be saved forever.

Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 117 different sources and contains 388,707 records.

OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.