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SEE ALSO: Open Access guide
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This Maynooth University OER libguide by is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning and materials and resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions (UNESCO, 2019).
This guide has been developed in collaboration between the MU IUA Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning Initiative and MU Library to provide an introduction to the benefits and challenges associated with finding, using and sharing OERs in Teaching, Learning and Assessment.
Image Credits: Jonathasmello, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
OER are freely accessible, openly licensed digital assets that are can be used for teaching and learning, and include:
A resource can be described as an OER if it meets the following criteria:
Image by BCOER Librarians from BCcampus (CC 4.0)
Using OER can provide a number of benefits to staff and students:
"According to a newly released study by Achieving the Dream, implementation of Open Education Resources (OER) found “significant benefits to instruction and student learning experiences” in addition to the cost savings passed on to the students. Over 60% of students reported that their overall quality of their learning experience was higher in comparison to a typical, non-OER course." (Source: https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/blog/2018/10/25/oer-materials-beneficial-to-students-per-new-study/)
Advantages of using OERs include:
[Source: University of Maryland Global Campus: Library. 2020 CC-NC-SA 4.0 International licence.]
Potential challenges of OERs can include:
Source: University of Maryland Global Campus: Library. 2020 CC-NC-SA 4.0 International license.
Why share materials as OER?
Not quite, but it's a good question! In the Open Science diagram on the left (2020), you can see OER forms part of Open Science.
Open Educational Resources (OER) form a subset of Open Access (OA) content. OER are always OA, but not all OA is an OER.
So, to put it in other words, we can say that OER will always be Open Access by their very nature, but not all OA materials are considered OER as not all allow re-use, remixing, etc. For example, an Open Access project may share data with others, but it might not be licensed for use in terms of re-using it by a third party, or re-mixing it.
Image credits: ‘Open Science scheme’ (2020). Maastrict: Merlin Institute. https://merlninstitute.com/templates/yootheme/cache/Open_Science_scheme-ce49b830.jpeg