Getting Started
About this guide
This guide will help you with:
- Finding alternative or supplementary resources to support your area of teaching, including
- Utilising DRM-free resources from academic publishers
- Locating discipline-specific open educational resources (OERs)
- Suggestions for alternative, open access study resources that are freely accessible to students.
What are DRM-free resources?
DRM-free resources are (predominantly) ebook collections with licencing agreements that allow greater accessibility and flexibility for individual use. DRM-free resources can be copied and downloaded in their entirety, and accessed simultaneously by an unlimited number of users.
DRM-free resources are not 'open access'. The Library subscribes to these resources and their usage informs future purchasing decisions.
What are OERs?
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing, as well as for research purposes. OERs are typically:
- Free to access online
- Low cost to get a print copy
- Licensed by the author/creator with rights that are less restrictive than copyright (i.e. all rights reserved).
Find out more about Open Education.
- A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER) byPublication Date: 2015 (ebook)
Evaluating OERs
With so many freely available resources online, choosing OER can be overwhelming. These resources may help:
- BC Campus OpenEd - Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Education Resources
This checklist contains some suggestions for faculty when choosing resources for teaching.
- Achieve: Open Education Resources Evaluation Tool Handbook
Offers a method of filtering through the millions of OER learning objects to find those that will meet teaching needs.
- Achieve: Rubrics for Evaluating Open Education Resource (OER) Objects
An evaluation system for objects found within Open Education Resources. An object could include images, applets, lessons, units, assessments and more.
