Open educational resources (OER)
Open Educational Resources (OER) are "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that are in the public domain or published under an open license that allows free access, as well as its use, adaptation and redistribution by others without any or limited restrictions" (UNESCO, Paris Declaration on Open Educational Resources 2012).
Open educational resources
OER can be courses, didactic modules, exercises, simulations, textbooks, games, multimedia material and other types of teaching and learning materials.
They are one of the elements that make up the new model of doing research, open science.
Source: Projecte Foster Open Science
The open education movement wants to minimize the digital divide and to support and promote more affordable and effective teaching and learning.
Watch this short video to learn more:
We also advise you to check the CLO OER Toolkit, that provides information and tools to help faculty and library staff to understand, engage with, and sustain OER.
Why create one OER?
When you create an OER, you...
- Contribute to knowledge sharing.
- Complement and improve your academic profile.
- Boost innovation in teaching and learning.
- Allow free access to quality teaching material.
- Reduce the cost of education for students.
- Increase the prestige of the UAB by promoting a more open education.
Sustainable Development Goal
Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDO4): Quality education.
For more information: Sustainable Development Goals.
The OER are free and open access and have been released under an open license (usually a Creative Commons one) that complies with David Wiley's 5Rs:
- Retain: the right to make, have or manage copies of the content.
- Reuse: right to reuse the content.
- Revise: right to modify and adapt the content.
- Remix: the right to combine the original content with other materials to create new ones.
- Redistribute: the right to share copies of the original, modified or remixed content with others.
An educational resource is considered an OER when it allows the re-purposing by others.
You can check the presentation Intellectual property in the teaching and research work of the PDI (in Catalan) if you have any doubts about the elements that must be included in the teaching materials to protect your rights.
- Find others for inspiration or reuse them according to your needs, if the conditions of use allow it.
- Search for audiovisual resources to develop your open resource. We recommend you the page Audiovisual resources for academic use
University courses
- MIT OpenCourseWare. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Contains a free and open collection of material from thousands of MIT courses covering the entire MIT curriculum.
- OpenCourseWare UA. (University of Alicante). Open courses (under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license) in the various areas taught at the university.
- Open Michigan. (University of Michigan). Can be found images, videos, textual materials and other open-licensed materials.
- TUDelft OpenCourseWare. (Delft University of Technology). It contains high-quality educational materials that are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and assessment tools, as well as thematic content.
- UC3M OpenCourseWare. (University Carlos III of Madrid). Courses classified by subject.
- CCCOER. Access to open resources of all kinds with tips on how to find them.
- UAB Digital Repository of Documents (DDD). Collection of classroom materials, guides, manuals and supporting documentation for training activities carried out within the teaching framework of the University.
- Learning materials online (MDX). Cooperative repository that contains materials and digital resources resulting from the teaching activity carried out at the member universities.
- MERLOT. Selected learning materials and online support, as well as content creation tools. Led by an international community of educators, learners, and researchers.
- OERCommons. Public digital library of open educational resources.
- OpenLearn. High-quality open educational resources.
- Procomún. Initiative of the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training of Spain (MEFP) intended for educational uses of learning. It includes the repository of Open Educational Resources (REO in Spanish) where you can find and create structured didactic material, classified in a standardized way (LOM-ES), ready for download and use by teachers and students.
You can create your open educational resource from scratch with the tools we offer you. Before you create your resource, however:
- Find out if what you want already exists or something similar that you can be inspired by or even reuse.
- If you need to create it again, think about what kind of resource you need to make and check out the tools we offer you to create it. Take into account the recommendations of the 5Rs..
Once you've created your open educational resource, you can think about where you want to publish it to give access to it.
Tools for creating
- eXeLearning. Free and open source editor to create educational resources
- MERLOT. Selected learning materials and online support, as well as content creation tools. Led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers
- OER Commons Open Author. Collection of resources for teachers and students.
- Software and digital resources for teaching. Collection of tools and resources developed by Andy Morodo and aimed at teachers who need to create new educational resources.
- TED-Ed Content Builder Tool. It adds TED videos to a theme creation template and complements the video with questions and additional content.
- TinyWow. Editor and converter of formats, texts, images, etc. Files, both uploaded and generated again, are deleted after 15 minutes.
Audiovisual resources for use
- Audiovisual resources for academic use. Repositories of audiovisual resources in open access, with Creative Commons of Public Domain licenses.
Once you have created your OER you can publish it on platforms or repositories such as the UAB Digital Repository of Documents (DDD), Merlot or OERCommons, in this way it is available to the educational community in open access. The UAB offers youthe DDD to publish your OER (To find out how to publish in the DDD, see our guide: How to deliver documents to the UAB Digital Repository of Documents).
You need to assign a license detailing the uses that are allowed, without asking for permission. The Creative Commons license recommended at the UAB for teaching resources is attribution (BY), non-commercial (NC) and share alike (SA) and complies with all OER requirements.
You can generate this license from the license chooser on the Creative Commons website.
It is important that the license is incorporated within the resource and easily identifiable. It is also necessary that it is attached to the UAB logo.
If you reuse materials, remember to check compatibility between licenses.
The Intellectual Property and Open Access web provides you with answers to the most frequently asked questions related to teaching and teaching materials, consult it and if you do not find the answer you want, ask a question directly through the same blog.
1. Before you start
- Prioritize resource usage with open licenses.
- Check if you can take advantage of the right to cite or if you need to ask permission.
- Cite third-party materials.
2. During the elaboration
- Add to the title page: authorship, affiliation, date, UAB logo, license of permitted uses (associated with the UAB logo).
- Clear and descriptive title.
- Contact email address, preferably the institutional address.
3. When publishing
- Use an open file format, preferably pdf, mp4, jpg, etc.
- Choose an open license.
- Publish in the UAB Institutional Repository (DDD) or in a specific repository for teaching materials. If you have created a textbook, you can consider publishing it in Open Book Publishers (UAB is a member) or in the Publications Service of the UAB.
- Use the permalink to disseminate your OER on social networks and the Virtual Campus (How to share a link to the Virtual Campus).
- You can also publish updated versions of the materials.