NoLo @ the CSCU Community Colleges

The CSCU Community Colleges are now flagging courses using OER or low cost resources in Banner.

Learn more...

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

Open Educational Resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute.

These resources include:

• Learning content: full courses, course material, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
• Tools: software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and online learning communities.
• Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.

Why OER?

OER is a relatively new movement in education; educators and learners as well as learning institutions are driving its development. OER provides an alternative to the rising costs of education. It alleviates the burden of student debt while providing opportunities to students who might not otherwise be able to afford or access materials. For example, in some countries like South Africa, many educators and learners are tapping into OER as the only source for textbooks.

OER provides an opportunity to try new ways of teaching and learning, many of which are more collaborative and participatory. Using OERs for your course gives you the opportunity to map interactive resources to your syllabus in a way that gives the opportunity for personalized learning! 

Don't just take our word for it! Read David Wiley's article Adopting OER is Better for Everyone Involved and the OpenEd Group's Review of all known empirical research on OERs. 

As your University's content curators, your Librarians are here to help! 

The Librarians are happy to answer your questions regarding:

• providing access to your work through the institutional repository, WestCollections
• consultation on publication issues -- author's rights, fair use of included materials, licensing and assignment of your research and publication
• education about open access and scholarly communication
• development of open educational resources (OERs) and teaching materials
• development of conferences, journals, workshops, datasets, and other scholarly communication

Library-led OER programs is the trend, which this article (go.nmc.org/acadoer) does a great job of explaining!