Open Educational Resources: What is an OER?

"An Introduction to Open Educational Resources" by Abbey Elder is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

• Fixing the Broken Textbook Market, 3rd ed - A survey on college textbook affordability during COVID-19
• Open Educational Resources (OER) in Texas Higher Education, 2019
• OER at Scale: The Academic and Economic Outcomes of Achieving the Dream's OER Degree Initiative
• Inflection Point: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education
• The Tidewater Z Degree and the INTRO Model for Sustaining OER Adoption
• The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics
• Maintaining Momentum Toward Graduation: OER and the Course Throughput Rate
• A Multi-institutional Study of the Impact of Open Textbook Adoption on the Learning Outcomes of Post-secondary Students

Additional Research on OER Efficacy is available form the Open Education Group: 

• Open Educational Group Research Publications

“The foundation of Open Education is Open Educational Resources (OER), which are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere. “Open” permissions are typically defined in terms of the “5R’s”: users are free to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute these educational materials.” - SPARC

There are a lot of things out there that are free, but that does not make them OER. Free does not equal open. To be considered OER, the material must have an open license. Open licenses enable what are called the 5R permissions: