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Including Library Resources in Your Course

Open Educational Resources

The Emory Libraries Scholarly Communications Office provides expertise in both open access and open educational resources (OERs).

What are OERs? UNESCO provides this definition: "Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with intellectual property licenses that facilitate the free use, adaptation and distribution of resources." This means that OER are freely available online for anyone to use, reuse, and share. Most creators share their OER under Creative Commons (or similar) licenses. Under these licenses, creators keep copyright ownership but let users copy, distribute, and remix the OER for their own purposes.

OER range widely in purpose and type, but the most common examples are textbooks, syllabi, and learning activities. Finding the right open educational resource (OER) can be the most challenging part of using OER in your classroom. These resources are a great place to start: