Open Educational Resources: CCCOER

Open Educational Resources (OER): educational materials with permission to use, modify and share at no cost.

At the center of open education is the belief that education is strengthened when shared openly. Open education relies on on open educational resources and open licensing. An open license permits users of a resource to participate in the 5R activities of OER:

• Retain:  Make, own, and control your own copy of content
• Reuse:   Use the content as-is
• Revise:  Adapt, adjust, modify, improve, or alter the content
• Remix:  Combine the original or revised content with other OER to create something new
• Redistribute:  Share your copies of the original content, revisions or remixes with others

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provides the following definition of open educational resources:  “OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. 

5R Definition adapted from David Wiley under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Read more about defining “open” in open educational resources.

Source: 'Why OER" https://www.cccoer.org/learn/

Benefits for Students

Using OER can provide tremendous cost savings for students as well as impact student success and completion rates. 

• The cost of textbooks can be a huge financial burden on students
• Open Educational Resources allow students to have learning materials right from the start

This is not a negligible point, as recent results of Florida Virtual Campus’ 2016 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey show: 

• 66.6 percent of surveyed students did not purchase a required textbook because of the cost, which these students felt resulted in them earning a poor or failing grade
• 47.6 percent of students surveyed also indicated that they have taken fewer courses, did not register for a course, dropped,  or withdrew from a course because of the cost of required textbooks.

Source: 'Why OER" https://www.cccoer.org/learn/

• Lumen Learning Impact Meter

  Adjust the meter to match the data from your institution. This is the potential impact OER could have for your students! Includes total amount of money students are spending on textbooks as well as how much each learning objective costs in comparison.