Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources (OER) are textbooks, interactive simulations and labs, instructional videos and other materials that are specifically designed for online use and completely free for instructors and students. These materials are peer reviewed, often created by prestigious institutions, and they allow instructors to move beyond the constraints imposed by traditional learning materials and experiment with new forms of teaching.

Search for OER

Our OER Research Guide contains links to over 1,000 free resources for specialized, general education and K-12 courses, in text, video, interactive web simulation and many other formats. It also allows you to access free collections of images, historical literature and primary sources. Click on the button below to get started!

OER Search Page

Understanding OER

OER are not simply free learning materials. They have special copyright conditions that allow you to use, combine and even make modifications to them to suit your teaching needs. Check out the Canvas tutorial below to learn about the different types of OER and copyright licenses for these materials, and expand your knowledge of copyright!

OER Tutorial 

Open Pedagogy Teaching

OER is also connected to open pedagogy, an educational movement that seeks to motivate students by engaging them to publish information on the web. Do you know that instead of having students write a research paper you can organize them to write an OER textbook on the course subject as a group? This activity challenges them to practice their research skills, learn how to write for a public audience, professional editing, peer reviewing the work of classmates, understanding copyright, and will allow students to publish a work that they can cite on their CVs. There are also many other ways for students to publish their work, such as through creating wiki pages and blogs. Please check out our open pedagogy Canvas guide.

Open Pedagogy

Pressbooks OER Creation Platform

Pressbooks is simple book production software, which allows you to create online textbooks, as well as books that are downloadable in the following formats:

MOBI (for Kindle ebooks)
EPUB (for all other ebookstores)
designed PDF (for print-on-demand and digital distribution).

Pressbooks is used by educational institutions and authors around the world. At Clemson it has been used by faculty to create learning resources, as well as in open pedagogy instruction. See what Clemson faculty and students are doing with this software platform.

Pressbooks

OER Blog (Coming Soon)

Are you an instructor, administrator or staff member or student who is enthusiastic about keeping up with new trends in OER teaching? Please check out our OER blog for up to date news on OER, open pedagogy and OER related events in Clemson.