Open Educational Resources: Home

• Student Success: Textbook costs negatively impact student access to required materials (66.6% did not purchase the required textbook) and learning (37.6% earn a poor grade; 19.8% fail a course).
• Graduation Rate: Because of textbook costs students reported that they take fewer courses (47.6%), do not register for a course (45.5%), drop a course (26.1%), or withdraw from courses (20.7%).
• Equity: A study by the University of Georgia reports a one-third reduction in DFW rate among minority and Pell-eligible students in courses which switched to OER.
• Class Design: Requiring students to buy a textbook means an obligation to teach to its goals. Conversely, OER can be edited to meet the course-specific goals for the class.
• Recruitment: Students choose courses with zero-cost textbooks. A course or department offering zero-cost textbooks will be able to market to current and incoming students.

[Research provided by the 2016 Florida Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey. Studies by Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission and Student Public Interest Research Groups corroborate the findings.]

• OASIS

  A large user friendly OER search engine that allows for users to search by subject or by course material type (e.g. textbooks, simulations, audio).

• Mason OER Metafinder

  This search engine from George Mason University is connected to 15 major OER repositories.

• Connexions

  Large repository of individual teachers' content, some courses and lots of modular writings about a variety of topics.

• Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES)

  This repository contains learning materials, software, data, and models for teaching quantitative skills in undergraduate biology courses. QUBES is developed in part by faculty at the University of Pittsburgh 

• AMSER

  Materials in the Applied Math and Science Educational Repository are free for use and adaptation. Most resources are at the high school and community college levels.

• Edsitement!

  Learning objects and lessons from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It offers a large collection of peer evaluated websites.

• Community of Online Research Assignments

  Open resource for faculty and librarians about Research Assignments. A research assignment is anything that requires students to engage with information resources in a critical or reflective way. This most often includes finding, retrieving, analyzing and evaluating, using and integrating, or organizing the information in order to produce new knowledge.

• OpenCulture

  This blog formatted repository seeks to bring together free resources on culture and education. The list of movies here is impressive.

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. By creating or adapting OERs, you can make high-quality educational materials such as textbooks and modules available at a lower cost. Most of the materials linked from this guide are Creative Commons-licensed, so you can adapt and re-use the material as long as you attribute the author. 

The Five R's of Openness:

• Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
• 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 material 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)

Open vs. Public Access

When using open access materials for PSU coursework, it is best to use no-cost open access materials and pass those savings on to students. The term "open access" is often used interchangeably with "free of charge," but this is not always the case. An important distinction must be made between something that is open access (and freely available) versus something that is truly public access (and free of charge). For more information visit the Public Library of Science (PLOS) guide, How Open Is It? 

This material was created by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/

Copyright, Creative Commons, and Fair Use

Copyright

Copyright is a form of intellectual property.

The U.S. Copyright Office defines copyright as

• A set of exclusive rights awarded to a copyright holder or owner for an original and creative work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression.
• A limited statutory monopoly that gives a copyright holder the sole right to market a work for a limited period of time.
• Copyright also includes exemptions that permit a user of the copyright-protected work the right to exercise an exclusive right without authorization or royalty payment under certain conditions.

(Source: U.S. Copyright Office, "Copyright Basics" - http://copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf)

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) licensing is at the heart of the OER movement. CC allows creators to specify more flexible forms of copyright that allows "others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work."

Look for copyright information (often at the bottom of webpages). Creative Commons licensed material sometimes display clickable icons that indicate the specifics of licensing. Examples:

See the Creative Commons website for more info and to acquire license icons.

Apply a CC License to make your work re-usable on your terms. The chart explains the different CC licenses and what the licenses allow others to do with your work. Click to view larger image.

Fair Use

In general, Copyright Law prohibits reproducing and distributing copyrighted works. However, the "Fair Use Doctrine" (Section 107) allows a limited amount of copying for purposes such as teaching and scholarship. In determining whether the use made of a work in a particular case is a Fair Use, the factors to be considered include:

• The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes;
• The nature of the copyrighted work;
• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyright work as a whole; and
• The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Fair Use raises almost as many questions as it answers, and can be a persistent source of concern for teachers.  The most important point to remember is that Fair Use is both a right and a privilege, and does provide a substantial degree of freedom and protection for teachers. However, that freedom is often challenged, and in reality most educational institutions do not have the resources, skill, or will to engage in long and expensive legal battles over this issue. 

The Fair Use Checklist can be helpful in determining whether or not usage falls under fair use.

*From the University of Pittsburgh guide on OER