Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources are freely accessible and openly licensed teaching and learning materials that can be reused, shared, revised and remixed.

Benefits of Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OERs) include textbooks, quizzes, games, videos, and other course materials. Adopting OERs come with many benefits, including:

customisation - allows academics to customise course materials
currency – material can be quickly updated to reflect new knowledge
cultural diversity – can reflect the diverse student voice and include first nations representation
student affordability – help to lower the cost of study
access flexibility– ongoing access to free learning materials from anywhere at any time
equity - all students have access to the same learning materials
deeper learning – the multiple format content may enhance the learning experience, increasing student engagement, and course completion.

Need more information?

Open Educational Resources (OERs) guide

The Library's Teaching support team can help

Ask us for:

OER recommendations for new course development and those undergoing a review activity
advice on how to replace commercial textbooks with OERs
advice on embedding OER content in Canvas
advice on open licensing and Creative Commons.

Contact our Teaching support team

Find OERs

We have curated a list of collections and search tools to help you find OERs:

Finding OER Textbooks (Library Shorts)

Learn how to find Open Education Resources (OER) textbooks using several search engines, how to access the texts, and how to identify the Creative Commons licence so you can use them in your teaching. (video 4:38 mins).

Ed Talks: Open Educational Resources

James Glapa-Grossklag, the Dean of Educational Technology from the College of the Canyons in Southern California talks about the importance of Open Educational Resources during his visit to RMIT. (3:14 mins).

Ed Talks: Open Educational Resources

Transcript

[Music]

James Galapagos Clegg : At an institution like RMIT, where you're really taking care to ensure that your students are in touch with industry and are highly employable with openly licensed materials you're able to immediately adapt and update those materials, so that your students are best prepared.

[Music]

Hi, I'm James Galapagos Clegg, I'm with College of the Canyons in beautiful sunny Southern California in the United States, where I serve as an academic dean. Amongst my other varied roles there, I support our open educational resources initiative.

Open educational resources or OER are openly licensed teaching and learning materials that can be repurposed, shared, copied, edited in order to benefit all students, all learners. The thing about OERs is that they represent a tool to achieve larger goals that most institutions of Higher Education have in common.

For example, removing barriers to student success, if we think about the number one barrier that students in the United States at least identify as the barrier to their academic success, that's the cost barrier. By using open educational resources, which are freely available and openly licensed learning resources, we can remove that cost barrier and provide students with, for example, complete textbooks that are zero cost.

Another reason why we would consider using open educational resources to support common goals in Higher Education would have to do with contextualizing these learning resources that we want our students to engage with. Very often we find with commercial learning resources that they are produced by people, who are not in our communities. If learning resource is openly licensed and thereby has permissions to re-edit it, we can contextualize those learning resources to better reflect our community. For example, in my context in Southern California oftentimes commercial textbooks will use in examples names of students, for example Joe and Mary, but in my context, in my world students have names Jose and Maria. Learning resources open-licensed were able to make those edits to better reflect our students’ experience.

There are great number of studies now that demonstrate that when academics move from commercial products to open educational resources, the success rates of their students increase. Students are more likely to finish the courses, they're more likely to be successful at the courses, and this is particularly true when we disaggregate the statistics. If we look at the success of female learners, their success goes up. Success rates of students who come from financially disadvantaged backgrounds their success goes up.
That's really a vote of confidence in the value of learning resources. When we actually find a way to provide our students with the learning resources, their learning increases and again in the United States there's a really rapidly growing body of knowledge that demonstrates that's true.

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Open Educational Resources