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Open Educational Resources (OERs) for Business

Getting started

UNESCO describes OERs as “learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others”.

Some benefits of using OERs

  • Instructors can revise course content to suit their and their students’ needs in the context in which education takes place. This allows teachers to select and use only content they deem relevant to their teaching context. The one size fits all model traditionally used in education does not allow teachers to customize materials based on their students’ individual needs.
  • As the world around us is evolving, education materials need to keep up. Teaching materials need to be constantly updated which can prove to be an expensive exercise given the already high cost of  some textbooks. Many OERs are the result of collaborations among multiple individuals which makes it easier to keep them updated. Timelines of information included in OERs can be addressed much faster than updating static sources of information, such as already published textbooks which would require the publication of a new edition to address those changes.
  • Costs of educational materials can be quite high; using OERs helps educators eliminate cost barriers to education. Many students report opting out of purchasing required materials for their classes because they find the cost prohibitive, and some listed this as one of the reasons for dropping classes. 
  • Ease of access – students can access these materials anytime, anywhere.
  • Use of OERs encourages collaboration among teachers or between teachers and students. Experts from various social, geographic and education backgrounds can contribute their expertise.

OERs @ NSU

The following are recordings of workshops offered by NSU Libraries as part of our Gear Up series.

Please note some of these books might be reference books; reference books are only available for use in the library. You can identify those by looking at the Copies tab in the record of each book – the Location section should say Sherman Library Reference and the Status section should say LIB USE ONLY.

OERs in Florida

For those interested in OERs, collaborate with fellow Florida educators by joining the listserv or add your name to the OPEN FL Community Directory.

 

Florida Virtual Campus - OATER Task Force

An Action Plan for Building a Statewide Infrastructure to Support OER in Florida’s Public Institutions of Higher Education (September 2016)

This report combines the recommendations made to the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) in A Preliminary Report of the Open Access Textbook and Education Resources (OATER) Task Force, November 10, 2015, with the results from OATER’s OER Survey of Statewide Efforts to Reduce Textbooks Costs conducted from February 29 through March 25 of 2016. The goal of both the preliminary report and the survey was to determine how best to build a statewide infrastructure to support the successful implementation of Open Educational Resources (OER) in Florida’s public institutions of higher education. The recommendations in this report focus on building an OER community and Knowledge Base.