Open Educational Resources

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.”

"5Rs Graphic" Lumen Learning, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license

Types of OER:

Open educational resources (OER) include any and all educational resources that are completely free to use:

• Open textbooks (Libretexts, Openstax, Press Books)
• Homework systems (ADAPT by Libretexts, My Open Math)
• Ancillary materials (presentations, worksheets, etc., such as those found on Merlot)
• Digital materials (videos, images, open software, etc.)
• Learning modules/whole courses (such as those found on Canvas Commons)

Open Licenses

OERs also use Creative Commons (CC) licenses, which give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, What can I do with this work?

Definition adapted from "About CC Licenses" Creative Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license

In ZTC marked courses, students do not incur any costs for obtaining course materials. There are multiple ways to get a course to ZTC. Using OER is one (extremely important) way to get it there. However, faculty can also use:

**Class sets of novels and other volumes provided by the institution may also be used if there are no equivalent OERs or other free resources.**

ZTC Wheel by Ame Maloney for Skyline ZTC is licensed CC BY.