Open Educational Resources (OER) at Penn State

What are Open Educational Resources?

• OER can be described as openly licensed teaching, learning, and research resources that are free to use, reuse, modify, and share with attribution. In addition, faculty can consult with Penn State Libraries to find additional low-cost (less than $50 for students), free-to-read, and library materials that do not have an open license but are free for students to access.
• Open Resources can include readings, textbooks, media (images, videos, etc.), assignments, assessment banks, and more.

What is Open at Penn State?

• Open at Penn State refers to not only OERs but other ways to advance affordable, discoverable, and equitable access to information, research, educational resources, and research data within the University community. The University libraries and their partners across the institution collaborate to ensure open access. For more information, visit the oer.psu.edu website.
• You can also see some of Penn State’s open access courses via the Repository of Open and Affordable Materials (ROAM) webpage.

Benefits of using OER Resources in courses:

• OER promote equality for all students regardless of financial status.
• OER are accessible on the first day of class. Students are prone to delay purchasing textbooks or choose not to purchase at all. Our military students may find it difficult to ship books to their location. Using OER enables all students to have equal access to the OER resources from day one.
• OER are created with accessibility in mind. There is a drive to make these resources accessible, and this makes the resources inclusive to all. For example, students who are in need of accommodations are better served by the OERs when compared to traditionally published materials.
• OER can be retained. Unlike rental textbooks or subscription textbooks with codes that expire each semester, OER is openly licensed so that students have ongoing access.
• OER can be continually improved. Because OER are made available digitally, they can be updated as frequently as needed. This is a big advantage over traditional print materials that have a considerable lag time in production.
• OER positively impacted student grades. According to Colvard et al. (2018), OERs positively impacted student success metrics including higher grades and higher course completion rates. Their study can be accessed here.