Open Education Resources (OER) are content with permission to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute for teaching, learning, and research purposes (Hilton & Wiley, 2012). They can replace expensive textbooks while allowing delivery of quality instruction (Wiley, Green & Soares, 2012), and are freely & easily accessible to anyone with internet access.
Instead of copyright, OER are licensed through the Creative Commons by Non-Commercial, Share-Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA). Look for the CC-BY-NC-SA attribute on resources that you would like to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute to build your own course content.
Below are links to OER from my colleagues and myself. Thanks to so many in the Open Education community for sharing their lists of resources!
- Georgia Tech Biology OER
- Biological Principles (Bio 1): bio1510.biology.gatech.edu
- Organismal Biology (Bio 2): bio1520.biology.gatech.edu
- The Biology of Sex and Death (for non-science majors): bio1220.biology.gatech.edu
- The University of Pittsburgh Big List
- MNSU Open Resource Library
Direct links to OER that we use extensively in building our our own Biology course OER include:
- Wikimedia (add this term to google searches)
- OpenStax (openstax.org)
- TED Talks (www.ted.com/talks)
- Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org)
- CourseSource (www.coursesource.org)
Curious about research on Open Education? The Open Education Group website has a repository of published studies, as well as calls for becoming an Open Education Fellow. The OpenEd Group frames its research around educational Costs to students, student learning Outcomes, how Usage of OER compares to commercial options, and Perceptions of OER by students and faculty—the COUP framework.
Chrissy Spencer 