OER

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

The abbreviation OER stands for Open Educational Resources.  OER are open teaching and learning materials that are made available online, free of charge and legally to every user.

You as the author can put OER online without or with minor restrictions and thus decide for yourself which rights of use you grant and which rights you reserve. This deployment of OER is made possible by free licenses, usually by Creative Commons licenses (CC). The various CC licenses allow users legal and free use. In the case of CC licensed materials, the author does not lose any copyright claim, but instead informs the user directly what may be done with the materials and under what conditions. The original authors are always named.
If you would like to learn more about OER and licensing, you can attend the online self-study course Introduction to Open Educational Resources on OpenRUB.

Screenshot des Lernangebot
Screenshot of the "Introduction OER" self-study course


Where on OpenRUB Can I Find OERs?

To help you directly recognize which contents OER materials provide on OpenRUB, the licenses (Copyright or Creative Comons licenses) for the respective material are displayed on a material overview page with description.
Other OER platforms and materials can be found, for example, in our OER-Database (from the open Moodle course „Open Teaching and Learning“) here on OpenRUB. In the database you can filter the entries by subject and institution (university, school and further education).

 

Where can I find OERs in general?

If you want to find teaching material outside of OpenRUB, you can, for example, explore the following popular options.

  • CC-Search

    At http://search.creativecommons.org you will find a search engine that serves to find CC materials and thus OER. CC-Search uses other search engines and platforms (such as Google or Soundcloud) and outputs materials with a CC license as a result.

  • Filter Functions

    Many search engines and platforms such as Google, YouTube or Flickr have filter functions that can be set to display only freely available materials. Filter your search for usage rights:
    Example: Google Image Search > Settings > Search Options > Usage Rights (select the desired usage rights)

  • OER Worldmap

    The OER Worldmap shows you registered OER materials and locations around the world.
    https://oerworldmap.org/resource/

  • Hashtags

    You can find OER materials via Google or Twitter using certain hashtags (#), for example #OERde.

  • OER-Platforms (Examples)

    www.creativecommons.org/education
    www.medienportal.siemens-stiftung.org