Open Educational Resources 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. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge" (Hewitt Foundation). Thus, OER are any teaching and learning materials that are made available to others to use without cost, and with an open license that allows them to reuse, revise and redistribute them.
OER can be anything from syllabi, lecture notes, presentation slides, videos, podcasts, assigned readings, instructions for doing various kinds of assignments, and more. Many OER are resources that instructors are already using for their courses that they make available for others to revise and reuse. Sometimes students create OER as part of their work in courses.
Open UBC is a curated collection of resources for faculty and students to learn about the why, what and how of open education practices and what they mean to teaching and learning at UBC.
Open UBC also offers a number of workshops and events on open practices.
It is important to review your content to ensure you have the right to share it with others.
To learn about your rights as an author and to get support for your copyright questions, go to the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office website.