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Open Touro OER Initiative: Open Educational Resources

This guide provides information about Open Educational Resources for professors, students, and self-learners.

Open Touro

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Open Touro is Touro University's Open Education Resources (OER) initiative. With this project, we aim to reduce the cost of textbooks for our students and increase student retention and success, raise awareness of OER, and assist faculty in selecting, adopting, adapting, and creating open textbooks for their courses. 

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Kirk Snyder
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What is OER?

According to OER Commons, "Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others." An OER gives you the five rights below:

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OER Community Courses

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These interactive modules from SUNY will introduce you to the basics of open educational resources, including finding OER for your courses and understanding copyright and licensing relevant to OER.

Why use open textbooks? Benefits for students

OER in the News

FREE OPEN TEXTBOOKS & OTHER OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES GAIN POPULARITY

In a new Physics Today article, OpenStax founder Richard Baraniuk and others in the education field weigh in on the growth of open educational resources. Baraniuk estimates that the nonprofit’s books have helped save students nearly $2 billion. 

Read the full article here. 

For archived OER in the News posts, see: https://bit.ly/oernews

 

OER Mythbusting

Myth #1: Open simply means free. Fact: Open means the permission to freely download, edit, and share materials to better serve all students

Myth #2: All OER are digital. Fact: OER take many formats, including print, digital, audio, and more

 Myth #3: “You get what you pay for.” Fact: OER can be produced to the same quality standards as traditional textbooks

Myth #4: Copyright for OER is complicated. Fact: Open licensing makes OER easy to freely and legally use

 Myth #5: OER are not sustainable. Fact: Models are evolving to support the sustainability and continuous improvement of OER

Myth #6: Open textbooks lack ancillaries. Fact: Open textbooks often come with ancillaries, and when they do not, existing OER can provide additional support

 Myth #7: My institution is not ready for OER. Fact: Any institution can start with small steps toward OER that make an impact for students

 

Source: OER Mythbusting from SPARC

License

Creative Commons LicenseThis guide was created by librarians at Touro College and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If you re-use, remix or link to this guide, it would be appreciated if you could notify our staff.

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