Open Educational Resources: Home
Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning resources that are licensed in a way that allows anyone to freely use and re-purpose them. In addition to lowering student course material costs, OER provide an opportunity for instructors to customize content for their courses. Examples of OER include textbooks, syllabi, lectures, learning activities, assignments, and tests or quizzes (To see some examples in your subject area, check out Finding OER).
This guide is intended to help users find and create OER. For a "deeper dive" into OER, please see the library's self-paced course, "Owls Learn OER," on Canvas (restricted to Rice users). The modules are also publicly available as a pdf.
Interested in learning more about how you can find, adopt, or create open educational resources? Contact Fondren’s Digital Scholarship Services at cds@rice.edu
The 5 Rs of OER
Open Educational Resources are different from other types of learning materials because of the five ways they permit users to reuse the works ("5 Rs"):
- 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 material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
- 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)
- Retain: The right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
- 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, publish)
These permissions are granted in advance and are legally established through the public domain or with a Creative Commons license.