What are Open Educational Resources (OER), and why should I make my Pressbook content openly licensed?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching resources that are free for students to use and licensed in a way that allows others to remix, adapt and revise those resources. OER can include textbooks, videos, syllabi, as well as full courses.
OER saves students money on course materials and provides a way for educators to create, remix, modify and share materials to suit their own teaching needs. The price of college textbooks has risen dramatically over the last three decades, which has impacted students’ ability to pay for their education. OER addresses the textbook affordability crisis by providing materials that are free of cost and available at any time.
For more information on OER, see:
The UW Libraries Pressbooks platform is intended for the creation of Open Educational materials for use in a UW course. Your use of the UW Libraries Pressbooks Platform is governed by the Terms of Service.
The UW Libraries recommends assigning a Creative Commons license to any content you publish in Pressbooks. The Creative Commons offers a range of options from relatively restricted to designating the Content as being in the Public Domain. For guidance on copyright and choosing a license for your work, contact: uwlib-copyright@uw.edu
OER allow users to (5 Rs from David Wiley):
- Retain: users can make, archive, and own copies of the content
- Reuse: content can be reused in its unaltered form
- Revise: content can be adapted, adjusted, modified, and altered
- Remix: original or revised content can be combined with other content to create something new
- Redistribute: copies of the content can be shared with others in its original, revised or remixed form