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Open Educational Resources (OER)

This guide is intended to provide SNHU faculty/staff information and support in researching open educational resources and copyright/licensing.

Questions?

If you have any questions or if you would like more information, please contact: 

archives@snhu.edu

License Information

All original content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 This link opens in a new window International License. 3rd-party content including, but not limited to images and linked items, are subject to their own license terms.

What are OER/Open Educational Resources?

OER – Open Educational Resources refers to  a teaching, learning, or research resource that is offered freely to users in at least one format and that either resides in the public domain or has been released under an open copyright license that allows for its free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with attribution. This definition is used by federal and state governments, UNESCO, and major funding organizations.

OA – Open Access is defined as any literature, document, or other work that is made available online for free. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell what the usage rights are, and continued access may depend upon the owner of the website where the material is stored.

OLM – Openly Licensed Materials are resources that meet the criteria for Open Access but also include a clearly defined license agreement specifying terms of use. Creative Commons This link opens in a new window licenses are the most commonly used for OLMs, providing clarity on how materials can be reused, modified, and shared.

The 5 Rs of Open

The Open Education movement is built around the 5Rs of OpenThis link opens in a new window. These represent the gold standard in openness:

  1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
  2. Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in class, in study group, on a public website, in a video)
  3. Revise – the right to adapt, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
  4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g. mashup)
  5. 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)