I have been asked to give a brief, five minute, presentation on Open Educational Resources (OER) at our school’s welcome back event. Let’s start out with what are OERs?

Open educational resources (OER) are digital materials that can be re-used for teaching, learning, research and more, made available for free through open licenses, which allow uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone.^[1]

A key part of OERs is that they are available under a Creative Commons License which permits the re-use and even re-mixing of educational resources.

There are a number of repositories available providing a range of resources from learning objects through to complete courses. Here are some examples:

• Wikieducator
• BCcampus’ Shareable Online Learning Resources
• National Repository of Online Courses
• OER Commons
• Open Courseware Consortium
• YouTube.com

To see more about what I’ve written about Open Eduational Resoures, enter OER into the search box on the top right of the screen.