WHAT ARE OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OERs)?

Free to Use, Free to Improve, Free to Share

Not every online resource is an Open Educational Resource. While many materials are freely available on the internet, Open Educational Resources (OERs) go further by granting you legal permissions to use, modify, and share them without copyright restrictions.

OERs are teaching, learning, and research materials released under open licenses or in the public domain. This includes textbooks, videos, assessments, simulations, and entire courses. When creators apply open licenses to their work, they share specific rights from their copyright bundle with you—making education more accessible, affordable, and adaptable for everyone.

Understanding what makes a resource “open” helps you confidently find, use, and adapt materials that work for your students and your teaching context.

Understanding OERs

OERs are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license. This means you can access, use, adapt, and share them with few or no restrictions. OERs can include:

Textbooks and course modules
Videos, images, and audio files
Assignments and assessments
Simulations and interactive tools
Full courses or course materials

Why OERs matter

For students, OERs remove financial barriers to learning. Students can access course materials on day one without waiting for financial aid or choosing between textbooks and groceries.

For educators, OERs provide flexibility. You can adapt materials to fit your teaching context, update examples to stay current, and customize content to better serve your students’ needs.

For institutions, OERs support equity and student success. When all students have equal access to high-quality learning materials, we create more equitable learning environments.

OERs embody the principles of open education by removing permission and financial barriers, enabling collaboration across institutions, and empowering educators and students to co-create knowledge rather than simply consuming content.

Using OERs – the 5Rs

What makes OERs different from other free online resources? It’s the legal permissions that come with them.

Open licenses grant you specific permissions known as the 5Rs: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute. These permissions let you download and keep resources, use them in different contexts, modify them for your students, combine materials from multiple sources, and share your adaptations with others.

The 5Rs are what distinguish truly open resources from materials that are simply free. While free resources might have no cost, open resources grant you the legal permissions to adapt and share them. Click the plus signs on the image below to explore what each permission means and see practical examples of how educators use them.

H5P Background Image by Designers for Learning: Gain Experience for Good by Jennifer Maddrell. Published with a CC-BY-NC-SA license.

Resources

Defining the “Open” in Open Content and Open Educational Resources

The Open Licensing Spectrum

Not all OERs are equally “open.” While all open resources allow you to use them freely, the specific permissions vary depending on the license the creator chose. The most common open licenses are Creative Commons (CC) licenses. These licenses exist on a spectrum from most open to least open:

Diagram showing the Creative Commons license spectrum from most open to least open. On the left (most open, shown in green) is Public Domain (PD) which allows share, remix, and commercial use. Moving right through increasingly restrictive licenses: CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-ND, and CC BY-NC-ND. Each license shows icons indicating which rights are permitted: share, remix, and commercial use. The spectrum ends on the right (least open, shown in red) with traditional copyright (all rights reserved) which permits none of these uses. — Modifed by Amanda Grey from Creative commons license spectrum by Shaddim, licensed under CC BY 4.0

The most open licenses allow you to do all 5Rs with minimal restrictions, while more restrictive licenses limit some adaptations or commercial uses. For example, some licenses require you to share adaptations under the same license, while others prohibit commercial use or don’t allow modifications at all.

When you use an OER, check its license to understand what permissions you have. When you create or adapt an OER, choose a license that reflects how openly you want to share your work.

Want to learn more about license types and how to choose one?

Understanding Open Licensing Toolkit

Going Open

Sharing your resources as OERs involves three straightforward steps.

Step 1: Add a license
Step 2: Provide Attribution
Step 3: Publish it online

Choose and display a Creative Commons license somewhere on your resource. Common Locations to place licensing information include:

Website – Footer, home page
Presentation – First slide; slide notes
Document – Footer; title/cover page
Open Textbooks – Metadata; front matter

If you have not placed the licensing information anywhere on your resource, it is not an OER – it’s not open.

Make sure you’ve attributed all of the pieces that were created by someone else, and note where you have made adaptations.

Attribution in open education follows a TASL format: Title, Author, Source (link), and License.

Learn more attribution

The resource needs be published and shared somewhere where people can actually access and use it.

Publishing Options

Use a platform that has a catalogue. For example, KPU Pressbooks has its own Catalogue, and Pressbooks can add any Pressbook to the Pressbooks Directory for wider reach.

OER Repositories

There are many online repositories that specifically focus on hosting open educational resources. There are more general repositories like OER Commons, or repositories with a more targeted focus like the B.C. Open Collection (BCcampus) which contains open textbooks published in BC.

If a repository doesn’t quite fit your resource, you could also post a link to your project on a website, blog, or other public forum. However, this might be more difficult for people to find. One of the advantages to putting your resource in a repository is that it has a permanent home where people will always be able to access it.