Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials that are in the public domain or that have been introduced with an open license. An open license means that anyone can use, copy and re-share the materials. OER can be in the form of full courses, course materials, textbooks, curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, tests, assignments, videos or audio (UNESCO)
Valencia College libraries also have subscriptions to a multitude of resources than can be embedded in Canvas to also supplement your course materials. Even though these resources are not OER, they can be used together with OER to reduce the cost for students.
Open educational resources are materials for teaching or learning that are either in the public domain or have been released under a license that allows them to be freely used, changed, or shared with others
The longer answer is that Open Educational Resources (OER) represent a subset of Open Access (OA) material. OER are always Open Access, but not all OA materials are considered OER. Open Access materials incorporate all types of information that are freely available to the public.
Open Access can ensure students get the best possible education and are not artificially limited by the selection of scholarly journals their campuses are able to provide.
Key Benefits of OER
OER eliminates the barrier to education that the high cost of textbooks often imposes.
OER helps your students have access to the materials on the first day of class.
OER helps to reduce equity gaps.
OER can increase the currency and relevancy of content since most can quickly be updated, and students learn more when they have access to quality, relevant materials.
Allows faculty to customize the text to their specific course
Allows students to participate in the creation of textbook content