Open Educational Resources for Teaching and Learning: OER Home

What are Open Educational Resources?

  Banner heading reading Open Educational Resources

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost, and without needing to ask permission. Unlike copyrighted resources, OER have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights" (OER Commons, 2020).

OERs might include educational materials such as textbooks, lecture notes, curricula, tests, or other media, and can extend to whole modules, software, and full courses. The aim is that this material can be used, copied, shared, and adapted legally and freely, although some form of acknowledgement for example using Creative Commons (CC) licences may be required. 

Benefits of using OER

Adopting a resource like an open textbook to supplement the resources on your module can:

  • be an affordable option for students who commonly feedback on the high costs of textbooks
  • allow you to make your text/s available online without barriers, supporting group work and assigned reading
  • be integrated into the online reading lists
  • allow you to use sections of multiple texts to tailor your reading lists to better suit your teaching

Find more information about OER benefits from the JISC website.

Finding OER Materials

Image of books on a shelfOpen Washington: Find OER
Open Washington's OER site compiles lists of link to OER courseware, images, text and audio-visual materials.  You can also visit the main site for a short course on using OER and links to resources. 
 

Image of books on a shelf​MIT OpenCourseware

Course syllabus and resources, including lecture videos, assignments and exams in a variety of subject areas to view and download. 

Image of books on a shelfROAD: Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources  

UNESCO funded project to create a directory of Open Access publications, including journals, conferences and annuals, that have been awarded an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number). You can search for publications but not their content.
 

Image of books on a shelfTU Delft OpenCourseWare

Delft University of Technology have made a range of courses in the health, physical and environmental science available. Materials include video lectures and open access resources.   

Using OER in Teaching and Learning

Adopting open educational resources on your module?

You can add resources to your reading list

If you want help or guidance talk with your Academic Liaison Librarian or get copyright advice from the Library at copyright@brunel.ac.uk  

Image of books with the text Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources Information

UNESCO OER Pages: Definitions, frameworks, publications and resources on advancing OER

OER Commons: Hub on OER provided by ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. This site aims to progress knowledge and use of OER, and provides access to resources and courses suitable for Key Stage to University level teaching and learning. 

JISC OER: JISC guide detailing the applications and practicalities of using OER.  

OA Books Toolkit: A recent collaboration between the University of Glasgow and Springer Nature that seeks to make visible the publishing process in OA Books in order to encourage publication. 

Open Data

Data repositories are websites you can use to find research data to use in your own research or deposit your research data for others to use.

Brunel University London's mini site on the research repository Figshare. 

Digital research data in the social sciences and humanities.​

Search for a research data repository.

Lists research data repositories.

LibSmart Point

Opening hours

Academic Liaison Librarians are available between 1pm-4pm, Monday to Friday term-time to discuss queries about using library resources and referencing.

Outside of these times, you can use the Library chat service and your query will be picked up by another member of Brunel Library staff or our friendly co-op support staff, who provide us with 24/7 chat coverage.