Open Education Resources FAQ
for NIBLSE Incubators
What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?
How does OER help educators and students?
What is the difference between 'free' and 'open' resources?
How do I know if an educational resource is an OER?
What are the best practices for hosting OER in online platforms?
What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
How does OER help educators and students?
Open educational resources give educators the ability to adapt instructional resources to the individual needs of their students, to ensure that resources are up to-date, and to ensure that cost is not a barrier to accessing high-quality standards aligned resources.
What is the difference between 'free' and 'open' resources?
Open educational resources are and always will be free in digital form, but not all free resources are OER. Free resources may be temporarily free or may be restricted from use at some time in the future (including by the addition of fees to access those resources). Moreover, free resources which may not be modified, adapted or redistributed without express permissions from the copyright holder are not OER.
Are all OER digital?
Like most educational resources these days, most OER are “born” digital. But like traditional resources, they can be made available to students in both digital and printed formats (including in the form of a traditional ‘textbook’). Of course, digital OER are easier to share, modify, and redistribute, but being digital is not what makes something an OER or not.
How do I know if an educational resource is an OER?
The key distinguishing characteristic of OER is its intellectual property license and the freedoms the license grants to others to share and adapt it. If a lesson plan or activity is not clearly tagged or marked as being in the public domain or having an open license, it is not OER. It’s that simple.
While custom copyright licenses can be developed to facilitate the development and use of OER, often it can be easier to apply free-to-use standardized licenses developed specifically for that purpose, such as those developed by Creative Commons or – for software – those approved by the Open Source Initiative. Note that Creative Commons (CC) licenses that include an ND clause (i.e., no derivatives) are not considered OER. For more information about CC licenses see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ . For information about Open Source Initiative approved licenses for software, see: https://opensource.org/licenses
The suggested license for NIBLSE Incubators is the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. This allows for sharing and adaptation of the material, including for commercial uses, as long as proper attribution is given, and all contributions are distributed under the same license as the original.
What are the best practices for hosting OER in online platforms?
Some online services collect and share OER in ways that make them easier to find and vet based on their alignment to standards (see for example OERCommons). Online platforms, like QUBES, are used to help create and share OER making it easy for educators to:
- Attach an open license to their lesson plan or instructional resource
- QUBES utilizes Creative Commons licensing, and defaults to the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license for Publications.
- Download the OER hosted on the platform in an editable format.
- QUBES Publications contain a downloadable bundle of related files, that are generally in editable formats.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Adapted from “#GoOpen: OER for K-12 Educators” (www.tinyurl.com/GoOpen) by Doug Levin, and "Frequently Asked Questions OER for K-12 Educators" (https://www.oercommons.org/static/staticpages/documents/FAQ-OER-K-12.pdf), also available under a CC BY license. Modifications include the addition of information specific to QUBES and NIBLSE Incubators.