Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials which are licensed in ways that allow individuals and institutions to freely use and reuse, adapt and modify the materials for their own personal or educational use, without charge.
OERs can, and do include full courses, textbooks, streaming videos, exams, software, and any other materials or techniques supporting learning.
The OER uses Creative Commons Licenses, specifically, those licences that afford permissions to reuse and modify educational materials on condition that the original copyright owners are properly attributed. The Creative Commons licence will outline specifically how the materials may be used, reused, adapted and shared. The legal permission framework of Creative Commons licences significantly reduces the transaction costs associated with sharing teaching materials for the social good of education.
For detailed information on using and finding OER resources see the OER library guide
OER can be downloaded, embedded, re-used or adapted to suit particular teaching or learning activities, depending on the license.
Most Open Educational Resources have a Creative Commons license. This means they are free-to-use. However, there are six different variations of this license, as well as different stipulations. For example, certain Creative Commons online resources may be used for commercial use. All Creative Commons licenses and public domain resources require an attribution. This means that you must include an in-text reference, possibly a link or credit if you decide to use the online content in your teaching and learning materials.
For assistance with referencing, please see Melbourne Polytechnic Library's ERNI Easy Referencing Tool.
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Directory of Open Access Journals Indexes more than 10000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities. It is a white list of open access journals and aims to be the starting point for all information searches for quality, peer reviewed, open access material. |
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Full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. The Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work. |
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A national repository that provides Australian schools with more than 20,000 digital resources aligned to the Australian Curriculum. |
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Encyclopedia of Life gathers, generates, and shares knowledge in an open, freely accessible and trusted digital resource. Including sources of biodiversity knowledge that are legally and practically shareable. |
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Europeana works with thousands of European archives, libraries and museums to share cultural heritage for enjoyment, education and research. Europeana Collections provides access to over 50 million digitised items – books, music, artworks and more. |
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Hindawi is one of the world’s largest publishers of peer-reviewed, fully Open Access journals. With the help of their academic Editors, based in institutions around the globe, Hindawi are able to focus on serving authors while preserving robust publishing standards and editorial integrity. |
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A large library of videos covering math, biology, chemistry, physics and even the humanities, finance and history. Khan videos are short 10 minute long tutorials with an instructor narrating explanations and working things out on a board by hand on your computer screen. |
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An interdisciplinary, open educational resource with case studies that can be used by anyone. Many of these case studies focus on topics in sustainability, but we also include cases on other topics that benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. |
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The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is a collaborative, digital, open infrastructure that pulls together Australian biodiversity data from multiple sources, making it accessible and reusable. The ALA is Australia’s national biodiversity database and provides free, online access to millions of occurrence records. |
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The Australian Bureau of Statistics The ABS is Australia’s national statistical agency, providing trusted official statistics on a wide range of economic, social, population and environmental matters of importance to Australia. |
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The collections are open to the public and include Open Courseware, Open Textbooks, 3d object models, learning modules, lesson plans and videos. Including higher education content. |
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The National Pollutant Inventory provides the community, industry and government with free information about substance emissions in Australia. |
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PhET provides fun, free, interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations. PhET extensively test and evaluate each simulation to ensure educational effectiveness. The simulations are written in Java, Flash or HTML5, and can be run online or downloaded to your computer. |
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PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. |
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WikiVet is a worldwide collaborative project to develop a comprehensive on-line peer reviewed veterinary knowledge database. The aim is to cover the entire undergraduate curriculum. |