The original content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. You are free to share, adapt, and customize these materials for teaching, learning, or professional development purposes. We encourage you to make these resources your own to meet your unique needs. 
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that are freely accessible and openly licensed, allowing educators and students to use, adapt, share, and redistribute them. These resources can include textbooks, lesson plans, videos, assessments, and even tools for creating and managing content. OER reside in the public domain or are protected by open licenses, such as Creative Commons, which promote flexibility and innovation in education while reducing costs and improving access for learners.
This guide is designed to help you explore and integrate OER into your teaching, with tips for finding, adapting, and creating resources. Our library team is here to provide support through consultations, workshops, and guidance in navigating open licenses and platforms.
Creative Commons (CC) licenses are a cornerstone of the OER movement. These licenses give creators the ability to define flexible copyright terms, allowing others to copy, share, and adapt their work while retaining attribution and control over how it is used.
When searching for OER, look for copyright information, often found at the bottom of webpages. Creative Commons-licensed materials typically display icons that indicate the specific terms of use.
Visit the Creative Commons website to learn more about licensing options, access detailed explanations, and download license icons for your work. Applying a CC license to your content allows you to make your work reusable while setting clear terms for how it can be shared and modified. The chart below explains the different CC licenses and their permissions—click to enlarge.
Open Access (OA) refers to digital, online scholarly materials that are freely available to anyone. Unlike traditionally published works, OA literature is free of charge and typically features more flexible copyright and licensing terms, benefiting both users and authors.
Although OA represents a newer model of scholarly publishing, many OA journals adhere to rigorous peer-review standards and uphold high levels of quality. For a comprehensive introduction, see Peter Suber’s overview of Open Access.
Open Education refers to educational practices and resources that prioritize accessibility, equity, and collaboration by removing barriers such as cost, copyright restrictions, and geographic location. It leverages freely available, openly licensed materials—such as textbooks, courses, and tools—and innovative teaching approaches to empower learners and educators to adapt and share knowledge. Open Education aims to democratize learning and foster lifelong education for all.
Open Education Global. (n.d.). What is Open Education? Retrieved from https://www.oeglobal.org/
Retain The right to make, own, and control copies of the content. This means you can download, duplicate, and store OER for personal or institutional use.
Reuse The right to use the content in its unaltered form in a variety of ways, such as in classes, on websites, or in presentations.
Revise The right to adapt, adjust, or modify the content to better fit your needs, such as translating it into another language or updating it with new information.
Remix The right to combine the original or revised content with other materials to create something new, like integrating multiple OER resources into a single course module.
Redistribute The right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others, ensuring the resource remains accessible to a wider audience.
Wiley, D. (n.d.). Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from https://opencontent.org/definition