About OER

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials — books, articles, images, audio, video, full courses, modules, tests, software, and more — that educators can freely create, (re)use, own, and modify at no cost. Their open licensing allows instructors to customize them to specific teaching needs and learning contexts, among many other benefits. They're used at all levels of education, from K-12 to graduate school, and more faculty rely on them every year.

Open education also includes open pedagogical practices, which position students as researchers and co-creators of knowledge.

Open education efforts focus specifically on teaching and curriculum as part of the broader landscape of open knowledge. The multiple interrelated Open movements challenge systemic barriers to information access and scholarly communications. Proponents of Open frame educational and research outputs as public goods, arguing that sharing and collaboration foster higher-quality end products, advance global research goals, and enhance humanity's ability to address grand challenges.

You may be familiar with other Open initiatives at the University of Maryland, including:

• Open access publishing and open scholarship

• Open data

• Open science

• Open source software

• UMD's Publishing, Access, and Contract Terms (PACT) working group