Open Educational Resources: What are OER?

What distinguishes OER from other freely available materials is that they are openly licensed. There are several kinds of open licenses, but most common are the Creative Commons (CC) licenses. There are four license elements that can be combined to create six different CC licenses. The elements are:  

 BY (Attribution)

 SA (Share Alike)

 NC (Non-Commercial)

 ND (No Derivatives)

To see the six licenses, visit the Creative Commons site. 

You can also put your work into the public domain with a CC0 license:

​​​​​​ CC0 (Public Domain)

CC licenses and other open licenses give users permission to do some or all of the following: 

• Retain: Resource can be retained for personal archives
• Reuse: Resource can be reused in its original (unaltered) format
• Revise: Resource can be adapted or altered
• Remix: Resource (both unaltered and edited versions) can be combined with other open resources to create something new
• Redistribute: Copies of the resource can be distributed in its original, revised, or remixed form 

• ​​​International Journal of Open Educational Resources
• Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education
• OER & Beyond
• Open Pedagogy Notebook