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Open Educational Resources

Introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER)

What is OER? 

According to Creative Commons, OER or Open Educational Resources "are teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities: 

  • Retain – make, own, and control a copy of the resource
  • Reuse – use your original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource publicly
  • Revise – edit, adapt, and modify your copy of the resource
  • Remix – combine your original or revised copy of the resource with other existing material to create something new
  • Redistribute – share copies of your original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource with others"

Open educational Resources are low or no cost to students, and also give faculty the ability to customize their course content to match exactly what they need.

How is OER being used at KCC?

You can find a list of courses using OER and the faculty using them at this page.

If you're interested in the process of using OER at KCC, please contact Kassie Dunham at Dunham, chair of the Instruction Innovation Committee. 

I'd like to use OER, where do I start?

Check out the box below, visit Finding OER page of this guide, or contact your Library Liaison.

OER Repositories- By Type

MOM iconMason OER Metafinder (MOM)
 
Advanced Search

"The Mason OER Metafinder helps you find Open Educational Resources.  Unlike other OER discovery sites (e.g, OER Commons, OASIS, MERLOT, OpenStax, etc.) with our Metafinder you aren’t searching a static database that we’ve built.  Instead, the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button."