Open Educational Resources (OERs)

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are available in the public domain or are licensed in a way that provides free and perpetual permission to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute.  OERs include any medium and any format from full courses, specific course material, textbooks, videos, or any other format that support learning.

The “5 Rs” is a framework that encourages educators to capitalize on the unique rights associated with open content. These rights include the ability to:      

• Retain - Make and own copies of the work (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
• Reuse - Use the work in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
• Revise - Adapt, modify and translate the work (e.g., translate the content into another language)
• Remix - Combine it with another resource to make a new work (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
• Redistribute - Share the work with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

These rights, or permissions, are made possible through open licensing. For example, Creative Commons open licences help creators of OER retain copyright while allowing others to reproduce, distribute, and make some uses of their work.

Attribution:

The 5 Rs of OER is a derivative of the 5 R Permissions of OER by Lumen Learning, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Benefits of OER to researchers include: 

• Created by educators and scholars, using the peer review process 
• Increased opportunities for collaboration  
• Reduce costs to educational resources and increase accessibility  
• Flexibility to adapt and customise to meet specific pedagogical needs 
• Reduce the need to create new learning materials  
• Improve student learning outcomes 
• Freedom of access (e.g. at work/home/placement) and lifelong learning 
• Inclusion of different voices and perspectives 
• Authentic or ‘real-life’ learning experiences through OER that link to employer or professional sector activities

Open Educational Resources (OER) by UOW Library, CC BY SA 

Feel free to make a copy or re-use this page as long as you credit UNM HSLIC.

This guide was created by a Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center staff member and is licensed by the Health Science Library and Informatics Center of the University of New Mexico under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. 

Some of the information in this guide was derived from Open Educational Resources: A Primer by Jennifer Jordan, CC BY 4.0