Open Educational Resources (OER) are free and openly licensed course materials, such as free textbooks, that can help ensure that all of your students, regardless of their financial situation have free access to your course materials on the first day of class. OER include traditional textbooks, lesson plans, videos, quizzes and more. There are many ways to use OER including: adopting an existing OER, adapting an OER to meet the needs of your specific class, or creating a new OER. You can even work with your students to create an OER as a course open pedagogy project!
As part of the Libraries' goal to enrich the student experience we support interested faculty in lowering student costs through the adoption of low-/no-cost materials, and where there may be gaps in a discipline, faculty can work with the library to author new OER.
Funding and Support
UO Libraries offers funding to faculty interested in adopting Open Educational Resources. Faculty who convert their course from high-cost ($50+) to no-cost are eligible to apply for a $1,000 award. Preference will be given to courses that are high enrollment, Core Education, and/or have high DFNW rates. Apply here or get in touch with the OER Team (oer@uoregon.edu) with any questions.
The OER and Textbook Affordability team can also provide support finding OER to adopt or adapt and publishing support for faculty interested in publishing OER. To learn more about OER or start an OER project, sign up for a consultation with the OER team or email oer@uoregon.edu.
UO Libraries supports two open source OER publishing platforms that faculty and staff can use to publish new OER or adapt existing content to fit their needs. To learn more about either platform, request access, or get a demo contact the OER team or set up a consultation anytime.
Pressbooks
Pressbooks is a WordPress-based OER platform that makes it simple to create polished eBooks and generate export formats including PDFs and EPUBs. Check out OER published by UO authors on Pressbooks.
Manifold
Manifold is a digital publishing platform used for journals, OER, open access books and other digital projects.
