OER – What is it?

Some students have heard the term OER, or Open Educational Resources, but what are they exactly? According to the Hewlett Foundation: “[they] are educational materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.”

Does this mean FREE TEXTBOOKS? Well, maybe yes and maybe no. OER are sometimes less that free textbooks, and sometimes more. How can that be?

The concept of OER is simple. Due to the increase of textbook prices over the last couple of decades, buying books has become a significant proportion of college costs, especially for students on limited budgets. The OER movement seeks to provide alternatives to expensive books by providing open textbooks that are free, or at least, low-cost, as well as other educational resources such as lecture notes, course outlines, online classes and much more.

The reason I say that it can be less than Free Textbooks, is that OER is still growing and at the present time there are many specific areas and courses for which no equivalent to a commercially produced textbook is available. However, as the concept catches on and as more support is provided by state and federal government as well as private donors, more authors are producing commercial-quality materials that they are providing free through organizations such as OER Commons, to which NHTI, as well as all our sister colleges of CCSNH as well as the members of the University System of New Hampshire, belong through a “hub” known as NH Open.

All across the nation (and around the world) the OER concept is being explored and developed. One source, OpenStax, created by Rice University, provides hundreds of free online textbooks. MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) which started at California State University now represents a consortium of many states’ educational resources combined to “provide access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools.”

For faculty members, all of these consortia offer help and support in developing or authoring new online texts, or to provide free or low-cost course materials (outlines, examples, questions, discussion guide, etc.) needed to present quality courses to their students. Hopefully, these courses will also provide the “FREE TEXTBOOKS” I mentioned in paragraph two, in order to provide the college-level learning outcomes required by NHTI.

Several courses at NHTI are already using OER material, either textbooks or links to various Websites where the required information is held and can be freely accessed. Other courses use instructor-provided material that take the place of a purchased textbook. As we all grow more aware of OER that can meet our students’ needs, the staff and faculty of NHTI will try to incorporate it into a larger proportion of the courses presented here.

Watch for future entries where we discuss how OER are created and licensed and how they differ from information in the public domain.