Open Educational Materials are free digital learning materials that may be reused and/or customized. They often use Creative Commons copyright. OERs can include:
Many of the links on this page are provided by Julia Nims, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Eastern Michigan University.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are any copyrightable work (or in the public domain) that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:
Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend) be retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute
Below you can search for OERs using the Mason OER Metafinder (a federated search engine that retrieves results from well-known OER repositories like OpenStax, OER Commons, MERLOT as well as sites like HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive and NYPL Digital Collections where valuable but often overlooked open educational materials may be found) or use the links to browse through various repositories of OERs.
OER can also be delivered through the IU eTexts program via Unizin Engage without fee to students. When searching for OER in the IU eTexts catalog, select the Open Textbook Library from the Publisher drop-down menu.
Search the Mason OER Metafinder:
Several universities have made available the educational course materials developed by their faculty.
The educational materials for each course may include syllabi, lectures, notes, powerpoint presentations, readings, assignments, and video or audio lectures, depending on the course, the semester, and the professor.
