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Open Educational Resources (OER)

A guide to OER at GWC.

What is an Open Educational Resource (OER)?

OER Open Educational Resources

"OER Logo" by Wikimedia Commons is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Open Educational Resources (OER) are high-quality teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license, such as a Creative Commons license, that permits their free use and repurposing by others, and may include other resources that are legally available and free of cost to students. (Hewlett Foundation)

OER Materials may include:

  • Textbooks
  • Course readings, articles, and journals
  • Course packs
  • Quizzes
  • Streaming videos
  • Virtually any other material used for educational purposes

Why use Open Educational Resources? 

OER are free, ready-to-use content for your classes. Creators and users are free to retain rights, reuse content, remix content, revise content, or redistribute content.

What is Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC)?

ZTC Wheel

Adapted from ZTC Wheel by Ame Maloney for Skyline ZTC is licensed CC BY.

S.B. 1359 states Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) course materials “may include open educational resources, institutionally licensed campus library materials that all students enrolled in the course have access to use, and other properly licensed and adopted materials.”

Zero textbook cost (ZTC) means that students do not incur any costs for purchasing course material. However, zero-cost to the students does not guarantee zero cost to the institution, ie. library subscription databases. To create a course that is at zero-cost to students, course instructors can use many platforms including Open Educational Resources; Open Access, Creative Commons, and public domain materials; along with instructor-created materials and resources owned or licensed by the Library.

  • Open Educational Resources (OERs) are free learning materials that are licensed, often under a Creative Commons license, to allow users to retain copies of OER content, as well as reuse, revise, remix and redistribute the content. OERs include textbooks, videos, tests, entire courses, course modules, and syllabi. 
  • Open Access (OA) license allows users to have immediate, unrestricted, digital access to content published under that OA license. 
  • Public Domain works may be used without seeking the copyright holder’s permission or paying a license fee because the content owner's exclusive intellectual property rights to that content may have been expired, forfeited, waived, and/or deemed inapplicable.
  • Instructor-created materials. You may already be incorporating ZTC resources in your class! If you have created your own resources for class and they are digitally available to students at no cost, they may be ZTC. Learn about licensing and sharing your own materials. Check out the page on Creative Commons on this guide.
  • Golden West College Library subscription electronic resources may be used as ZTC course material for the duration of our institutional subscription. ZTC Library resources include eBooks, journal articles, video, audio, and other media. These resources may be linked within your Canvas course. Check with the librarians on how and which resources qualify.
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License unless noted otherwise.