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Open Access guide: Open Textbooks & OERs

This guide will help USask researchers and students understand what open access (OA) is and how to make their own works OA.

Open Education @ USask

Liaison librarians have subject expertise and can help instructors find open textbooks or other open educational resources (OERs) appropriate for their classes. They can also suggest library resources so that students do not need to pay for course materials. Find the liaison for your discipline at the link below.

Heather Ross, at the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning, can assist you in adopting and/or adapting an open textbook for your USask course. There is also funding to support this adaptation or creation of OERs.

Find out more:

Find, Adopt, & Adapt an Open Textbook

Logo for Saskatchewan Open Education Resources

Other options:

Other Free Online Education Resources

Some Definitions

Open Education is a collection of practices and principles that encourage collaboration among educators to create educational resources that can be freely shared and distributed for learning and further collaboration.

Open Educational Resources (OERs), are educational materials which are licensed in ways that provide permissions for individuals and institutions to reuse, adapt and modify the materials for their own use (source).

Open CourseWare (OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high-quality college and university level educational materials.  These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content. Open CourseWare is free and openly licensed, accessible to anyone, anytime via the internet.

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at large-scale online participation.

OER Foundation