Consult with a Librarian
In this TED talk, Prof. David Wiley at BYU talks about what open education is, and why you should care. The video is about 15 minutes long, but the first minute or so will introduce you to the concept of OER and how it works.
What is OER?
Open educational resources are information assets that are freely accessible to use and openly licensed. They can include textbooks, media resources, and other digital assets meant to enhance teaching, learning, and assessment.
- SPARC OERThe Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition's guide to OER.
- OER StoriesWashington community and technical college faculty share their experiences.
What is OA?
"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder." -- Peter Suber, A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access
Characteristics:
- Freely accessible to all, without charge, institutional authentication requirements, or licensing fees
- Copyright and/or licensing restrictions on use are mostly or wholly absent
- Compatible with peer review
- Funding models that do not depend on reader subscriptions or pay-per-use or per-article fees
- Exists as either archival repositories, or fully-fledged peer-reviewed journals
- Focuses on royalty-free literature--that is, work where the author does not receive monetary compensation (though the other rewards of scholarship do accrue!)
Get Involved in OER
- Open WashingtonCollaborative network and OER repository focused on community and technical colleges in Washington State.
- Open Education ConsortiumWorldwide members-based network advocating for open education. Helps build OER capacity, develop policy, create sustainable models, and enable collaboration.