Additional Resources
- Iowa OER
Iowa OER is a statewide group supporting affordable higher education in Iowa. Its website provides information about state-specific OER topics and initiatives. Here you can find OER training modules, print resources, archived webinars, and more.
-------------------- - OpenHawks OER Grant Program
OpenHawks is a UI-based OER grant program with awards issued each spring semester to instructors who want to replace their current textbooks with open alternatives.
-------------------- - Open Education Network
The Open Education Network (OEN) provides support, education, and community for those working in the areas of OER and Open Education Practices (OEP).
-------------------- - SPARC
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) supports the creation and sharing of open materials used in teaching. It also supports new approaches to learning where people create and shape knowledge openly together, and promotes practices and policies that advance this vision.
-------------------- - University of Iowa Pressbooks
Pressbooks is an open-source tool for authoring OER textbooks, and is supported at UI by ITS. Sign up for an account at this link.
-------------------- - Getting Started with OER: A Guide for UI OpenHawks recipients
This guide provides UI-specific information about using and creating OER.
What are OER?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. They can include things like open textbooks, audio and video material, test questions, simulations, labs, slides, and anything else you might use in the course of teaching. Open Educational Resources must either be in the public domain or licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities described below.
5Rs: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute
Image credit: 5Rs by Ellen September, CC-BY 2.0
Examples of using the Five Rs include...
- Retain: Making, owning, and controlling copies of the content
- Reuse: Fully using the content for any purpose (e.g., using the materials in a class or study group)
- Revise: Adapting, adjusting, modifying, or altering the content (e.g., translating the content into another language)
- Remix: Incorporating the content with other content or making a mashup with other material
- Redistribute: Sharing original or altered version of the content (e.g., sending it to a friend)
Why Open Education Matters
This video explains the basics of open education and explains why it is so important:
Citation: Why Open Education Matters by Degreed