Open Educational Resources (OER)
“Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning materials that provide users with (1) free and unfettered access and (2) 5R legal permissions to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute them, that can be used to replace traditional expensive learning resources (such as textbooks).” Open Education Group
Open Education Campus Group
In alignment with the Academic Plan (Section Teaching Development 2.2), the University of Lethbridge supports Open Education on our campus. This support can take many forms, including consultations and funding for planned adoptions, adaptations and/ or creations of openly licensed academic materials or low-cost alternatives. Talk to any one of the Uleth OER Champtions, the Teaching Centre, the Library and the Bookstore come to one of our Open Education Campus Working group events.
We think that OER have many benefits to you and your students as they:
| Facilitate collaboration among content experts and students | |
| Ensure academic freedom to use, modify, retain and share content | |
| Enhance research and teaching visibility | |
| Provide more relevant and engaging materials to students | |
| Improve student retention by reducing costs | |
| Grant learners access to knowledge and quality education (SDG4) anytime | |
| Invite students to become content creators – meaningful assignments |
OER/ Open Access Learning Resource Fund
Do you have a project in mind that involves the adaptation or creation of openly-licensed resources as teaching materials for your courses? Then you might want to consider applying for the Open Acess Learning Resource Fund or the Teaching Development Fund. Both are being granted to innovative projects that positively impact student learning and the greater university teaching community.
Where to find OER?
If you are curious now what kind of materials there are openly available for your discipline, feel invited to browse this virtual corkboard below, which assembles most major OER repositories in one place instead of many. You can access the virtual noticeboard below by simply clicking on the pink links, which will direct you to the original websites. You might want to start your search by using this Metafinder tool as it searches 16 of the major global repositories.
You can also refer to the library information guides further down below by clicking either one of them.
And so many more FAQs
Do you want to know more about all the things related to content creation and modification? The Commonwealth of Learning OER Community of Practice platform will answer most of the questions you might have around all the facets of OER. The forum covers over everything from the basics to special inquiries on OER quality control, policy and development.