Open Educational Resources Guide Ask Us

The Open Education movement is an international effort to tear down boundaries to educational resources. Open Educational Resources (OER) are openly-licensed text, media, or other digital assets used for teaching, learning, and research. OER are typically free for users to use, modify, or distribute. In the Atlantic Provinces, OER infrastructure is supported through AtlanticOER, an initiative funded through the Council of Atlantic Ministers of Education & Training. This guide is intended to inform instructors on the 3 approaches to utilizing OER, the benefits for students of OER, and the supports available to UNB instructors.

Getting Started

• OER: A Field Guide for Academic Librarians
  May target librarians specifically, but is a comprehensive overview of the issues and topics related to OER.

Utilizing OER

Incorporating an OER into your instruction can be done in 3 primary ways.

*UNB affiliates may apply for grants for a variety of adaptation/creation related tasks through AtlanticOER - contact Catherine Gracey for more information.

Instructor Experiences

• Why Open Education Matters - University of Guelph
• About the UBC OER Champions - University of British Columbia 
• OER Champions at Uleth - University of Lethbridge
• CUNY Faculty Stories - City University of New York

Where to find OER

There are a number of collections of open textbooks and other resources that can be adopted and adapted to use in your course.

The resources listed below are just a small sample of the many platforms hosting openly-licensed content, many, many others exist! If you are unable to find openly licensed resources that meet your needs, please reach out for support.

Interdisciplinary

• ECampusOntario Open Textbook Library - collection of 180 open textbooks and resources, many of which have been reviewed and vetted by educators
• Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota) - a large collection of openly-licensed, peer-reviewed textbooks in all subject areas
• OpenStax (Rice University) - peer-reviewed open textbooks in science, math, business, and the social sciences
• LibreTexts (UC Davis) - open textbooks built by faculty, students, and outside experts
• Directory of Open Access Books - aggregator of open access books in a wide reange of subject areas

Science and Engineering

• Biointeractive (Howard Hughes Medical Institute): resources (activities, case students, media) that focus on core concepts and processes in biology, with interdisciplinary resources that connect to environmental science, chemistry, and math and statistics.
• ChemCollective (Carnegie Mellon): virtual labs, scenario-based learning activities, tutorials, and concept tests.
• Science Forward (Macaulay Honors College): videos, activities, data sets, and lessons that focus on building critical thinking across the scientific disciplines.
• OpenCourseware (TU Delft): courseware in Engineering and Applied Sciences that include lectures, exercises, readings, and other materials.
• EngineerTech: simulations on various topics in engineering technology.

Business and Economics

• LearningEdge Cases (MIT): case studies touching on areas such as strategy, sustainability, operations management and more.

Social Sciences and Humanities

• NOBA Psychology: modules that can be combined and customized to fit the scope and sequence of many psychology courses. Test banks, powerpoints, and instructor manuals available for many modules.
• COERLL (Centre for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning) (UTexas): textbooks, videos, lessons for teaching Chinese, Arabic, French, Spanish and other languages.

OER Collections/Repositories

• Pressbooks Directory
• OASIS
• Open Textbook Library @ OTN
• BC Campus 🇨🇦
• eCampus Ontario 🇨🇦
• Mason University OER Federated Search
• MERLOT @ California State
• myOpenMath
• OER Commons
• OER Courses @ SUNY
• Openstax
• HathiTrust Digital Library
• National Science Digital Library
• OA Open
• Wikibooks

Versluis, Ali. “Open Educational Resources.” University of Guelph Library, 2020, www.lib.uoguelph.ca/using-library/faculty-instructors/open-educational-resources.

The 5 Rs

OERs are "free", but not in the way we typically mean when we use that word. Open Scholarship isn't just about lowering boundaries to education via access but also about making that material reusable by others. In this way, OERs are "free as in speech, not as in food." Depending on the license attached to an OER, it can be free to copy, modify, print, distribute... etc. These are the characteristics behind the "5 Rs".

• retain | the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
• 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 open content 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)

David Wiley, CC, March 2014, http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221

Copyright and Licenses

Generally speaking, OER carry varying levels of Creative Commons licenses. The most common among these is CC By 4.0, which is a general use attribution license. The second most common is CC0, which isn't so much a license as it is a public domain declaration. OER resources will explicitly state the license type to help you understand usage rights. They are designed specifically to be shared, modified, and distributed, so many of the concerns related to classroom distribution are streamlined. Nevertheless, copyright can be an intimidating subject. Here are some resources for assisting with copyright in OER and in general.

• Creative Commons License Guide
• UNB Libraries Teaching and Copyright Guide
• UNB LIbraries Author's Rights Guide

If you need any assistance or have any questions, please contact copyright@unb.ca.

AtlanticOER is a service that supports the hosting and creation of Open Educational Resources developed by educators and students in the Atlantic provinces. Affiliates of UNB can open free accounts to use Pressbooks, a leading platform for digital publishing. There are also funding opportunities available through AtlanticOER for educators who are adapting or creating OER. If you are interested in creating an open textbook or open educational resource, reach out to Catherine Gracey, to discuss how we can help you get started.

For more general information about what is involved in making your own OER, please see the BC Campus publishing guides.