What are OER?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are free teaching and learning resources that reside in the public domain or have been shared under a license that allows others to use and revise them. OER can include textbooks, multimedia, and even entire courses – anything that is used for educational purposes can be an OER!
OER are different from other affordable course materials like eTexts, library resources, course reserves, and online resources. While these solutions are important for making course materials more financially accessible to all students, they often aren’t completely free to students or ‘open’ to the instructor.
OER are not only affordable, but also come with key permissions that other affordable course materials don't have. In addition to giving students fee-free access, OER are licensed such that any instructor can legally customize content to fit their specific learning objectives, students, and teaching style. Instructors can add new chapters and otherwise update existing OER content, then share their new version with their class and the world.