Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that have been released into the public domain or are under a Creative Commons license. OER can be reused, re-purposed, and “remixed” to better suit the user’s needs. The affordances of the open license are often referred to as the 5R permissions: the rights to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute these materials.

Open educational resources (OER) are free teaching and learning materials that are licensed to allow for revision and reuse. OER can be fully self-contained textbooks, videos, quizzes, learning modules, lesson plans, syllabi, worksheets, data, and more. The benefits of using OER in your courses include improved student engagement and success, immediate and equitable access to resources, cost savings for students, flexible and high-quality learning materials that can be adapted to fit your individualized curriculum, and professional contributions to teaching and learning in your field. Other open educational practices, such as open pedagogy, can result in the creation of OER.