Open Educational Resources (OER)

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (also known as OER) are teaching and learning resources that reside in the public domain or have been shared under a license that allow others to freely use and revise them. Open educational resources can include entire courses, course materials, textbooks, multimedia, or teaching techniques.

Why should I use OER?

Despite the rise of innovative new instructional technologies, for the average student and teacher, educational materials remain limited by high costs, copyright regulations, and technological barriers. Books and supplies were estimated to cost IU Bloomington students $1290 for the 2025-2026 academic year. This impacts students learning found that 65% of students will avoid buying expensive textbooks, even if they know their academic progress will suffer as a result. OER offer a solution to these issues, providing accessible content for students and increasing engagement in classrooms.

What is the difference between free and open?

OER are always free, but free content is not always considered open. A distinctive attribute of OER is the license they are shared under and that others can update, alter, or redistribute without the need to gain permission from the copyright holder. There is a wealth of content available online that is technically free but with restricted terms of use, even within the context of a classroom. Resources that are available for free but aren't open could also be technologically or economically restricted at any point in the future.

What is the difference between OER and affordable course material? Which should I use and when?

Affordable course content, like OER, works to make educational materials more financially accessible to students. Unlike OER, however, affordable content is not always free or open. "Affordable" refers to a wide variety of ways in which the cost of the content is reduced for students. Some examples include affordable eTexts or library licensed materials. Both are important for helping increase access so selecting which to use depends on the course you're teaching and the material available.

How do I make sure I find quality OER?

An essential part of finding quality OER is ensuring that the content is relevant to your course objectives, up to date, and properly edited and maintained. Be sure to check out the IU Libraries guide for evaluating OER for a step by step guide.

In order for a resource to be considered open, it must be shared under a Creative Commons license, often allowing others do the following:

• Retain a copy
• Reuse the content
• Revise or modify
• Remix or combine parts from various sources into one
• Redistribute the original and your revision/remix

IU Libraries staff can help you understand what the license enables you to do in your course. 

The Creative Commons license was created to make it easier for works to be shared.  The current copyright law provides for automatic copyright protection without a way to automatically grant permission to others to use the work.  The Creative Commons license is a way for creators to grant blanket licenses to users simply and with minimal costs.  The Creative Commons organization says its licenses "give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law."

The basic right in all Creative Commons license is that users are free to copy and distribute the work without modification for non-commercial purposes.  There are four conditions that creators can put on the basic license.  First, is the right of attribution, meaning that a user must give credit to the creator.  (This is abbreviated "BY.")  Second is "ShareAlike," abbreviated "SA", which means users can take your work and build upon it—remixing a song, using a photograph in a collage—as long as they acknowledge the original creator's work and license their derivative works on the same terms.  Third is that the work may only be used for non-commercial purposes, abbreviated "NC."  The fourth condition is that users may not make derivative works and cannot alter the work; this is abbreviated "ND."

There is a series of icons representing each of these conditions and their combinations that can be used as a shorthand indicator of the Creative Commons license being used.  There are six combinations of conditions which are regularly used, as shown in this chart from Wikipedia.

Icon	Description	Acronym	Free content
	Attribution alone	BY	Yes
	Attribution + NoDerivatives	BY-ND	No
	Attribution + ShareAlike	BY-SA	Yes
	Attribution + Noncommercial	BY-NC	No
	Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivatives	BY-NC-ND	No
	Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike	BY-NC-SA	No

The Creative Commons website makes choosing a license simple.  By answering a few questions, the user can get the proper icons and language to mark a work, whether that is an article, a photograph, or a webpage.  The website will also generate language to place on offline works and HTML code for online works.  Creative Commons also has tools that allow users to mark their work as public domain and waive all rights to it.  Creative Commons has guidance on issues to consider when choosing a license and a list of frequently asked questions.