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 sharing, accessing, repurposing including for commercial purposes and collaborating with others.”  

• Open Education Resources: A Fact Sheet for Adult Education
• Open Education Resources Texas Repository
  

National OER Resources

• OER Commons  – This website is a public digital library of open educational resources. Tools are available to help educators create, share, and collaborate on the development of instructional materials.
• OER Commons Adult Education Collection – This adult education repository of resources can be filtered by educational standard, subject area, educational level, material type, and language.
• CROWDEDlearning – This website provides a multitude of OER materials directly applicable to adult education and literacy instruction including academic competencies and 21st Century competencies. The site provides several components: Skill Directory, Content Repositories, Professional Development resources, and Teacher Tools.
• Adult Education Open Community of Resources Group – This group provides an opportunity for adult educators and learners to organize and use materials dedicated to supporting Adult Basic Education (ABE) and Adult English as a Second Language (Adult ESL) teaching and learning.
• OER STEM Science User Group – This group provides a variety of science resources including lesson plans, activities, interactive diagrams and simulations, and videos suitable for ABE and Adult Secondary Education (ASE) teaching and learning.
• National Science Digital Library (NSDL) – This website provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
• HippoCampus – A free, core academic web site that delivers rich multimedia content: videos, animations, and simulations on general education subjects to middle-school and high-school, and adult education teachers and college professors, and their students.
  
• Creative Commons – This website provides information on how to access free and open educational materials available on the world-wide web. Adult education practioners can learn how to create and share their works available under the Creative Commons licensing process.