Alternative Learning Materials Initiative (ALMI)

What are Open Educational Resources (OER) 

“OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.” -William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. 

• Open educational resources, or OER, are openly licensed materials created by instructors like you on a range of disciplines and subjects. Unlike traditionally published materials with strict copyrights, OER are published on the web and are designed and licensed for others to edit and reuse them.
• The idea behind OER is that education is about sharing and building on the ideas of others. You don’t always need to reinvent the wheel or stick with whatever a publisher makes available. OER allow you to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute a variety of course materials (see "The 5 R's of OER" section for more information).
• OER might be textbooks, worksheets, assignments, tests, presentations, simulations, or even full courses. And unlike copyrighted content, you can take these materials and keep or change as much or as little as you want.

Defining OER Video - The Council of Chief State School Officers 

Why Use OER? - The Council of Chief State School Officers 

The 5 Rs of OER

A useful way to appreciate the value of OER is to understand what you, the user of openly licensed content, are allowed to do with it. These permissions are granted in advance, and are legally established through Public Domain or Creative Commons copyrights:

1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
2. Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
3. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
5. Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

This material is adapted from original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.

SUNY OER Course Designation 

All SUNY campuses abide by the following definition to determine whether a course qualifies for OER designation:

• Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits repurposing by others.
• A SUNY OER course/section provides students a cost effective alternative to traditional textbooks. The majority of materials in this section reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits repurposing by others.

For the purposes of this policy, "majority" is understood to mean 51%.