Open Educational Resources (OER):
OERs are transforming society
- are educational materials that are freely available for everyone to use.
- Format materials in any medium, digital or otherwise
- Conditions that either
- are in the public domain, or
- have been released under an open license
- Nature: which permits their free use and re-purposing by others.
In other words:
- Free books and materials that are cleared of all copyright issues that you get to keep, modify, and distribute. An Open license grants permission to access, reuse, and redistribute, a work with few or no restrictions
- Creative Commons has created 6 licenses to manage these resources
Why OER?
The Open Education movement is built around the 5Rs of Openness, as described in The Access Compromise and the 5th R:
- Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
- Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
- Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
- Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
- Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
