The Opportunities OER Provide

Working with open educational resources (OER) offers many opportunities for instructors, learners, and the broader community. If you’re reading this guide, you likely know about at least some of the benefits of using OER, including cost savings for learners, but there are several others. Some benefits and opportunities may come from creating a new book, significantly adapting an existing open textbook, or minor updates of existing materials.

These opportunities include:

• Providing local examples within the materials
• Mixing and matching existing OER to meet your needs, as was done to create this version of Introduction to Psychology
• Integrating Indigenization and reconciliation into your learning materials
• Integrating equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) into your learning materials
• Integrating other unit or institutional priorities into learning materials
• Updating materials when new information becomes available, a link is broken, or an error is found
• Engaging with learners in open pedagogy to have them create or modify OER as part of experiential learning or authentic assessment. Learn more about open pedagogy from The University of Regina and The University of Saskatchewan.