Open Educational Resources (OER)

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials in any format that are freely available to students, educators, and the general public. OER are openly licensed so others can use, revise, adapt, and/or redistribute the material to meet their needs. 

What can be an OER?

Anything that's openly licensed! OER encompass a wide range of materials including textbooks, images, curricula, syllabi, quiz banks, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio/video, animation, and more.

"Open Educational Resources - retro graphic" by Lane Community College is licensed under CC-BY-NC 4.0

Who benefits from OER?

Faculty at Minnesota State Colleges and Universities who use OER in their courses save students over $3 MILLION in course resource costs each year. With OER, faculty have the ability to change and customize content to best fit their curriculum needs.

The following OER resources are specific to MinnState Colleges and Universities:

Your Librarians are Here to Help

The Inver Hills librarians are happy to help you with finding OER and answering OER-related questions.

We can:

• Search OER repositories for existing OER in your discipline or content area and provide you with curated list of possible resources.

• Purchase ebook versions of your course text or a similar course text on our EBSCO Ebooks platform.  

• Search for articles and ebooks available in our subscription databases that you can use in your class.

• Answer questions about OER or Creative Commons licenses.

Contact us at library@inverhills.edu or 651-450-3625