Open Access (OA) refers to freely available content permanently online such as scholarly articles and journals. These resources can be reused and there is some scope for alteration.
OER encourages remixing and redistribution of the resource and covers a much wider range of materials.
OA: Open Access - Free, permanent, full-text, online access to scientific and scholarly works. Focuses on sharing content, with no underlying licensing requirement
OER: Open Educational Resources - Openly licensed educational content, includes any educational content that is shared under an open license, and can be reused and remixed. Source: University of Michigan OER Toolkit.
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 their free use and re-purposing by others." From The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
OER materials are released under an open license granting permission for everyone to:
OER include digital learning materials such as:
Open textbooks are materials that are freely available, usually through a Creative Commons license, to download, modify, and print in various formats.
Why should faculty adopt an open textbook?
Some content and layout reused and remixed under CC license courtesy of Lansing Community College.