Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Library-Licensed Content

OER stands for open educational resources. OER are low or no-cost resources that are openly licensed and available for distribution. Open textbooks are one type of OER.

The terms "open content" and "open educational resources" describe any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms like "open source") that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities. 

OER are different from library-licensed content, which includes articles and e-books which the library pays for.

Library materials are licensed for noncommercial research, education, and scholarship. Users may view, download, and print reasonable portions. They may not redistribute or modify content in any way. Library-licensed materials have the advantage of free access as long as the student is enrolled. 

Adopting, adapting, or authoring OER is considered a major teaching and scholarship activity because they require significant course revision. 

Be sure to document any creation or adopt of OER resources in your evaluations and promotion materials!

The world of open education is growing rapidly, and open educational resources are available from numerous providers, including many of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. 

Digital repositories hosted by consortia, alliances, and institutional initiatives, dedicated to sharing and advocating for the use of OER, are excellent places to start your search. There are dozens of repositories out there, so we've provided some recommended starting points below.

Question banks: Banks of questions aligned to a course’s learning objectives that can be used to generate a quiz or exam for student assessment.

Lesson plans: Pre-generated plans for guided labs, activities, or other interactive learning opportunities.

Lecture notes and slides: Presentation slides and accompanying notes to guide and structure lectures around a specific module’s learning outcomes.

Videos: Examples, animations, or lecture recordings that review one or more topics relevant to a course or module.

Homework platforms: Automated systems for managing and grading practice exercises or other student assignments. These may be simple, grading against a basic answer key, or they may be more complex, and include adaptive learning tools. Adaptive learning tools provide multiple versions of the same type of question so students can get more experience practicing the concepts they struggle with while studying (Posner 2017).

Workbooks and lab books: Text-based collections of lessons or labs that walk students through topics related to their course.

Interactive content: Simulations, games, or other activities that students can engage with to enhance learning.

Full courses: Sets of course materials bundled to ease OER adoption for instructors. These might include a syllabus with mapped readings and slide sets, review questions, and quizzes or other course assessments.

1. Sometimes, ancillary resources are linked in an open textbook or linked within the same listing in the institutional repository where its related textbook is listed. These types of connections are useful to have because ancillaries shared in this way are often created by the same instructor(s) or team that created the open textbook, ensuring that the ancillaries are aligned to the book for which they were created and follow the same tone. A good example of this type can be seen in Professional Communications, an open textbook out of Fanshawe College (Smith et al. 2019).

Other times, ancillaries might be linked within or near the description of an open textbook. The Open Textbook Library has an “Ancillary Material” section in its item records, for example, and OpenStax links to free instructor resources from its textbooks as well (OpenStax, n.d.). Keep in mind that because OpenStax textbooks have been widely reused and adapted, the ancillaries available on the OpenStax website represent only a selection of the ancillaries for its books.

2. Use ancillary-specific platforms. Some websites and repositories specialize in openly licensed ancillary educational content. Popular examples include PhET simulations, SageMath, theH5P OER Hub, and MyOpenMath. Mathematics homework platforms were some of the first and most widely requested OER ancillary platforms created, due to the widespread use of expensive homework platforms for general education mathematics courses in higher education. For full courses, consider searching for “OER” in a platform like Canvas Commons, which is used to share easily imported course modules which have been created and shared by other instructors.

3. Search repositories that contain ancillaries. In addition to using repositories that specialize in ancillary content, you can also locate ancillary OER in general repositories that include a wide range of resources. Popular examples include OER Commons, LibreTexts, and SkillsCommons. Often, these repositories include Material type options in their advanced search or browsing menus to help you narrow your search.

4. Check institutional repositories (IRs). Often, OER ancillaries are developed by the faculty who use them and are shared via their institutional repositories (IRs). Two examples of IRs that contain OER are GALILEO (affiliated with the state of Georgia) and UNI ScholarWorks (affiliated with the University of Northern Iowa). Checking these repositories may yield surprising results! Tip: In some cases, IRs will have separate collections for OER materials, which can make searching for this material easier.

5. Explore open courseware (OCW) repositories and adopted resource lists. OCW repositories contain both ancillary OER and open textbooks aligned to a specific curriculum. These repositories, along with lists of adopted OER for specific campuses, may be able to fill the gaps in your program’s ancillary OER needs. Popular places to look include MIT OpenCourseWare, Open Oregon OER, and eCampusOntario’s H5P Studio. Open Oregon OER even offers an option to narrow by courses with ancillaries available in their adopted resources list.

Free but not open ancillaries

The first type of non-OER ancillary you might want to recommend are free-but-not-open ancillaries. Widely known resources of this type are YouTube videos (the ones that aren’t under a Creative Commons license). However, videos are only one example. Free online tools and applications, such as LearnItFast, are also popular no-cost course supplements, and there are many you can find online.

Often, free-but-not-open resources make great ancillary materials for faculty. However, there are a few situations where OER may be preferable. For example, if an instructor wants to adapt and publish a new version of a free-but-not-open resource, they will need to get permission from the original creator in order to do so, whereas this type of remixing is inherent to OER.

Ancillaries that are free for some users

The second type of non-OER ancillary resources you may encounter are the ones that are free for students but require an institutional fee and are not open. These might include library-licensed ebooks and materials provided through your institution’s Course Reserves system. While e-books and other subscription content provided through your institution’s library do have a cost attached to them for your institution, they are still a better investment than purchasing 10 copies of a course textbook that may have a new edition released next year.

Paid ancillaries for OER from smaller companies

The third type of non-OER ancillary you may encounter are the ancillary resources intended to support open textbooks that require a fee to access. Often, these fees are minimal, generally less than $20 per student. Examples of this type include companies like Grasple, which offers interactive mathematics exercises to supplement OpenStax textbooks, and Lumen Learning, which offers both integration with your institution’s LMS and homework software like their Online Homework Manager (OHM).

Email Karen Sheldon with the name of the course and textbook to be included in our list of OER courses. 

Works Cited

Elder, Abbey K., et al. The OER Starter Kit for Program Managers. Rebus Community, 2022, https://press.rebus.community/oerstarterkitpm/.