Open Access and Open Educational Resources: The Basics

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What Are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources are an open alternative to traditional teaching and learning materials. 

People have different definitions of them...

• “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.” -- UNESCO
  
• “Open educational resources (OER) are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes” -- Council of State School Officers
• “teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use.” -- SPARC

In other words, Open Educational Resources should:

1. Be freely available
2. Allow adaptation and mixing
3. Be pedagogically useful 

A lot of people think of digitized textbooks or instructional videos when they think of OERs, but primary source materials, worksheets, syllabi, activities, articles, or any other materials that facilitate learning also count! 

A lot of people prefer "OER" for both singular and plural uses and may be tempted to criticize my use of "OERs."  I'm choosing this usage because acronyms have their own lives and often don't function exactly as they would if you were using the constituent words as a phrase.

Find Your Own

There are big repositories of OER materials available online, including:

• OER Commons
• Open Textbook Library

You can also filter by license when you search in YouTube or Google. If you search for materials that are licensed via Creative Commons or that allow reuse and remodification, those are likely OERs!

Ask a Librarian

We're working on subject-specific lists of OER materials, but in the meantime, you can contact:

• Leila Walker (leila.walker@qc.cuny.edu)
• Kristin Hart (kristin.hart@qc.cuny.edu)
• Nancy Foasberg (nancy.foasberg@qc.cuny.edu) (me!)

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, textbook prices have not only risen precipitously, but have risen faster than all other costs related to education. 

Consumer Price Indexes for Tuition and School-Related Items, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Public domain.

Students who cannot afford textbooks often don't buy them; a survey from 2011 found that 70% of students had skipped buying a textbook because they can't afford it, even though most of them believed that not buying the textbook harmed their academic performance.

A more recent survey by Gale-Cengage found that buying textbooks is a source of financial stress to students; they may skip meals, take out loans, or take fewer classes in order to afford them. 

OERs have lots of benefits for both instructors and students!

• Greater textbook availability
  • You can ensure every student has access the first day of class
  • Avoid making students choose between textbooks and food!
• Broaden course materials
  • Thinking beyond the textbook
  • More pedagogical freedom
• Fit materials to the class you're teaching!
  • Bringing in local, contemporary or otherwise relevant materials
  • Adapt your textbooks to fit the focus of your course
  • Rewrite whatever you don't like!

Where to Share

You can share your OERs in CUNY Academic Works!  Submit them to the "Open Educational Resources" series under Queens College.

Licensing

Remember, true OERs allow reuse and remixing! If you want to release your materials in a way that allows others to make the best use of them, please license them with a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons provides an easy to use licensing tool for exactly this purpose.

I'd encourage you to choose a license that does not include the ND (No Derivatives) condition, because this condition prohibits others from adjusting your work to best suit their needs, which is what really makes it an OER!

Note that the CUNY Intellectual Property Policy states that you, as the author of a copyrightable work of pedagogy, own the copyright in your own work, which means that you have the right to apply a CC license to it. 

Open Access and Open Educational Resources: The Basics by Nancy Foasberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.