Skip to Main Content
Begley Library Homepage banner

Open Access and Open Educational Resources: OER Resources Home

What are OERs?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are defined as "born digital content made available for free or for a nominal fee in a range of formats, including textbooks, games, media, and instructional readings. OER are freely available online and can be used in learning management systems and accessed multiple times across various devices by an unlimited number of simultaneous users. They can be shared and their content remixed and repurposed by authors and users. Authors of OER materials maintain their rights to their work and use Creative Commons licensing terms or a similar type of agreement to share them."

Source: Okamoto, Karen. "Making Higher Education More Affordable, One Course Reading at a Time: Academic Libraries as Key Advocates for Open Access Textbooks and Educational Resources." Public Services Quarterly 9.4 (2013): 267-283 LISTA. Web. 28 Oct. 2015 opencontent.org/definition 

See also: Resources at SUNY OER Services

The 5 Rs of OER

A useful way to appreciate the value of OER is to understand what you, the user of openly licensed content, are allowed to do with it. These permissions are granted in advance, and are legally established through Public Domain or Creative Commons copyrights:

  1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
  2. 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)
  3. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
  4. 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)
  5. 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)

This material is from SUNY OER Services, which is available at https://online.suny.edu/sunyoercommunitycourse/understanding-oer/defining-oer This material is adapted from original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.

Read more about open rights on the SUNY Oneonta Copyright and Creative Commons page.

Why Use OERs

  • OER are adoptable 
  • OER are adaptable
  • OER can be digital or print
  • OER can be interactive and incorporate graded quizzes or multimedia materials
  • OER can be integrated into Brightspace
  • Reasons to use OER for students:
  • OER can minimize costs of course materials for students and create equity 
  • OER can be retained forever