OER Faculty Guide: Finding & Using OER

Welcome to the OER Research Guide!

This guide for faculty is a launch point for discovering & investigating Open Educational Resources (OER) at Skyline College and beyond. Here you'll find tips, tricks, best practices, informational videos and links to tried-and-true resources to support your journey from investigation to implementation of OER materials in your course.

Also included here are our OER recommendations by Discipline (Subject) and by Format (Multimedia).

You may notice that some disciplines are full of resources while others are scant. If you don't find what you're looking for, reach out directly to the ZTC Team at skylineztc@smccd.edu. We are always happy to assist.

- Your ZTC Team

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse, without charge. That means they have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights. For some of these resources, that means you can download the resource and share it with colleagues and students. For others, it may be that you can download a resource, edit it in some way, and then re-post it as a remixed work.  - OER Commons, 2015.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are legally free, shareable, customizable ready-to-use content for your classes. 

Creators and users of OER are free to retain their rights, reuse content, remix content, revise content, or redistribute content. This is because OER materials are released under an open license, such as a Creative Commons license, that specify how the material may be used. An open license grants permission to:

• Retain -- users have the right to make, archive, and own copies of the content
• Reuse -- content can be reused in its unaltered form
• Revise -- content can be adapted, adjusted, modified, and altered
• Remix -- original or revised content can be combined with other content to create something new
• Redistribute -- copies of the content can be shared with others in its original, revised or remixed form.

These are the five "R's" of OER! 

What types of materials can be considered OER?

OER include digital learning materials such as:

open textbooks

full courses & modules

syllabi

lectures & quizzes

homework assignments

lab activities

games & simulations

Graphic image from The Digital Evolution of Schooling blog post by Mallee, 2017.

Finding OER: Visit the Recommended OER by Discipline or Format using the left side navigation menu to get started.

Citing and attributing OER: Visit our Citing OER tab.

Content included in the OER Faculty Guide by Skyline Library is licensed CC BY 4.0 unless otherwise indicated.