OER by Discipline Guide University of Calgary

What are Open Educational Resources?

They range from textbooks to entire courses and everything in between, including videos, podcasts, tests, exercises, websites, software, simulations, case studies, presentations slides, and more. The key is that they can be widely distributed and adapted because they are at no cost to the user and are not subject to the usual copyright restrictions because the copyright holder has applied an open licence giving advanced permissions for their resource. This openness is most often indicated by a Creative Commons Licence.

What can be done with OER? The 5R’s of Open

Benefits of Open Educational Resources

• OER are free (or low-cost if printed) and thus affordable for students, making education more accessible.
• They can be customized and adapted to the course context and combined with other content and interactive or multimedia elements to provide richer teaching and learning opportunities.
• They offer remote and continued access since most OER are digital, do not require an access code and do not expire.
• They contribute to students’ success and completion by easing their financial burden without having a negative impact on their learning.
• OER can be an opportunity to co-create knowledge with students in the form of renewable assignments rather than limiting their role to that of consumers of information.

The adaptation of existing open educational resources and the creation of new resources are also opportunities to make course materials more accessible, inclusive, and representative for learners. This kind of flexibility rarely exists in traditional textbooks. Because OER are not created to satisfy a commercial market, they can address topics and include perspectives that would otherwise be neglected.

What are Creative Commons (CC) Licences?

Creative Commons Licences act like a permission. When a creator applies one of the six free licences on their work, they retain their copyright but allow the public to share, remix and reuse the work legally without having to ask permission or pay additional fees, provided that the user complies with the conditions of the licence.

The six CC Licences consist of three elements: the CC logo, icons representing a combination of conditions (which can also be represented by two letters or written out in long form), and the version (4.0 International is the most recent).

This is a comprehensive text meant for university-level biochemistry courses covering topics such as cellular structure, lipid structure, carbohydrate, DNA, binding, transport, kinetics, metabolism, catalysis, oxidation, and signal transduction. There are links and references for further investigation and chapter-based questions. This largely imitates commercial biochemistry textbooks.

This textbook has been successfully adopted. It should be noted that it was written in the context of Indian universities and has a dedicated section to Indian ecology; however, it is a high-quality resource that covers all of the necessary concepts.

Biology 2e is a peer reviewed textbook with all of the concepts covered in two terms of first year biology. It was written by biology professors from several institutions. Reviews are available.

Includes: Instructor resources, slides, simulations, applications, summaries, exercises, solutions.

This textbook was adapted for a Canadian audience from an OpenStax textbook. It was designed for students not majoring in Biology. Interactive activities were included for students to check their understanding.

Includes: Instructor resources, student resources, simulations, summaries, exercises, solutions