What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OERs) can ensure that every member of your class can access the resources they need without any barriers. They are any type of educational materials that have an open copyright licence (such as one from Creative Commons), or they are part of the public domain and have no copyright. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation. Source

In practice, this means that there are a host of resources that you and your students can access for free and online. The emphasis on free and accessible resources for students is especially important in the current context of remote learning. At a time when purchasing e-books for the library incurs a huge cost and limited access, utilising OERs can ensure that every member of your class has equal access to materials.

We have a guide, available here, which goes through where to find OERs and how to distribute them according to their license.