Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: What are OER?

Introduction: OER at NorQuest College

As a publicly funded post-secondary institution NorQuest College is working towards improving accessible, affordable and quality post-secondary education. One of the primary components of this initiative are Open Educational Resources (OER). NorQuest College is attempting to focus resources on developing and using OER to support reduced costs for learners and facilitate collaboration amongst instructors. This guide has been created as a central hub for OER. It contains a list of repositories; textbooks; and multimedia content. In addition it has resources for evaluating OER and creating OER. This OER infographic provides a short overview of OER to get you started.

Definition

"Open educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, or research materials that are now in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows free use, adaptation, and distribution. They are freely available online for everyone to use, or reuse, whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner" (Hatzipanagos & Gregson, 2015).

OER Examples Include:

Complete Courses (Including Readings, Activities and Videos); Modules; Curriculum Materials; K-12 Lesson Plans and Worksheets; Textbooks (Many Updated Regularly); Assessment Resources; Assignments; Lab and Classroom Activities; Games and Simulations; Multimedia Content (Including Videos, Tutorials and Audio)

Additional Definitions

General Information

A Basic guide to Open Educational Resources (OER)
This Guide comprises three sections: a summary of the key issues; a more comprehensive analysis of these issues, and a set of appendices, containing more detailed information about specific areas of relevance to OER.
How to Use Open Educational Resources
A self-paced introductory workshop. This course walks you through techniques to incorporate Open Educational Resources (OER) into your teaching practice. The course will cover the fundamental aspects of OER including open licensing and public domain. It focuses on providing practical guidance in locating and applying openly available resources.
Open Educational Resources: Resource Roundup
Explore this educator's guide to open educational resources for information about online repositories, curriculum-sharing websites, sources for lesson plans and activities, and open alternatives to textbooks.

Featured NorQuest OER

In the Community: An Intermediate Integrated Skills Textbook
The textbook is aimed at Canadian Language Benchmarks levels 5/6 and has been designed to be facilitated by an instructor.
In the Workplace: An Intermediate Integrated Skills Textbook
The textbook is aimed at Canadian Language Benchmark levels 5/6 and has been designed to be facilitated by an instructor.
An Orientation to Academic Integrity
This Moodle-based multimedia tutorial covers the topics of academic integrity, academic misconduct, and learning supports.

Featured Resource

Interactive Open Educational Resources by John D. Shank
Call Number: 001.42 SHA
ISBN: 9781118277454
Publication Date: 2013-12-13
Sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), this one-of-a-kind book demonstrates the best tools, resources, and techniques for discovering, selecting, and integrating interactive open educational resources (OERs) into the teaching and learning process.