Open Educational Resources: Overview

Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials and resources published in the public domain with open licenses. These open resources are offered freely and legally for use by anyone to adapt, improve and re-share.

Open Educational Resources may include:

• Open textbooks, course materials/modules, learning objects, homework assignments, quizzes, lab activities, games, simulations, self-developed educational videos.

Open Educational Resources are Released Under an Open License Granting Permission for Everyone to:

• Retain - users have the right to make, archive, and own copies of the content.
• Reuse - content can be reused in its unaltered form.
• Revise - content can be adapted, adjusted, modified, and altered.
• Remix - original or revised content can be combined with other contents to create new content.
• Redistribute - copies of the content can be shared with others in its original, revised or remixed form.

Getting Started with OER!

• NJIT university libraries provide support for faculty members who wish to locate and adopt open educational resources through the Open and Affordable Textbook (OAT) Initiative.
• Contact Ray Vasquez, or the OAT Team at oat-project@njit.edu to learn more about the OAT initiative.
• Most OER are released using terms of Creative Commons (CC) Licenses, understanding CC will help you to use OER better.

What is the problem?

• In a 2012 study, 65% of students reported opting out of buying textbooks, and 35% take fewer courses due to textbook costs (U.S. PIRG). As textbook costs continue to rise and publishers limit access to digital content, an information economy is created that is detrimental to students. This problem is likely to escalate in the future.

Why OER Matters?

• OER provide an opportunity for faculty to try new strategies for teaching and learning that are more collaborative and participatory. Faculty are using OER as an alternative to get students more involved and using the OER process as a way to collaborate with them on content creation. The process brings students into a larger context of learning and sharing knowledge beyond the classrooms.

Open Textbook Adoption Directly Impact Student Success

• Multi-institutional Study of the Impact of Open Textbooks Adoption on the Learning Outcomes

  Study of 16,000 students across 10 institutions, compares several measures of student academic success between those using open textbooks and those using traditional textbooks.
• Mainstreaming Open Textbooks: Educator Perspectives on the Impact

  Results shows that OER enables a majority of educators to better respond to student needs, making teaching easier, and changing teaching practices.
• What are the Impacts of Adopting OER?

  The OER Adoption Impact Calculator helps you understand many of the potential impacts of adopting OER instead of traditionally copyrighted learning materials. The values in the Settings on the left are set to defaults based on the published research referenced below. Change the Settings on the left so that they match the situation at your institution in order to see how replacing traditionally copyrighted materials with OER might benefit your students and institution. The information below will update in real time as you make changes.