An open license permits users of a resource to participate in the 5R activities of OER:

• Retain:  Make, own, and control your own copy of content
• Reuse:   Use the content as-is
• Revise:  Adapt, adjust, modify, improve, or alter the content
• Remix:  Combine the original or revised content with other OER to create something new
• Redistribute:  Share your copies of the original content, revisions or remixes with others

5R Definition adapted from David Wiley under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Open educational resources (OER) are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.

Why Use OER in your courses?

• Faculty that use OER exercise their academic freedom to select course materials, and can customize these materials to fit the specific needs of their students.
• Open Pedagogy:  provide you and your students with opportunities to spend your time and effort on work that is meaningful for students and benefits future classes.
• OER is a Social Justice issue!  As educators, we want all students to have access so they can be successful.
• Since OER permit adaptation, educators are free to edit, reorder, delete from, or remix OER materials.
• OER provide clearly defined rights to users, so educators are not faced with interpreting Fair Use and TEACH Act guidelines.

https://www.cccoer.org/learn/

• All students get access to course materials on Day 1
• Contextualize Learning: 
  • http://openedgroup.org/review
• Course throughput rate - drop, withdrawal, final grade 
• OER has better completion rates 

Understand what you can do with the resources you find:

More about the Creative Commons Licenses