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By Keila Santa '25
On Friday, March 7th, Scholarly Communications Librarian Rebecca Dowgiert hosted a webinar for Open Education Week where she shared her best open education research tips. Open Education Week celebrates and promotes accessible education by raising awareness about the impact of the movement and the free resources that have been made available because of it.
Since the rise of the internet, open education resources (OERs) have been a game changer for teachers and students. Many community colleges hopped onto the OER train early because they found that although students were taking courses at a slightly more reasonable tuition, they were having to buy commercial textbooks at a very high cost. This issue caused many universities to start developing repositories, and many schools today have specialized types of search engines.
Open education resources are teaching, research, and learning materials that are online, free, and editable due to being ‘openly licensed’. OER’s can get you a wide range of materials, from faculty handbooks, to homework problems, videos, textbooks, syllabi, and even a whole course. Generally, one of the best ways to tell the quality of an OER is by the reviews from past users. Since reviews can be subjective to the personal taste however, there are also certain rubrics available for assessing the content and accessibility of various textbooks.
Navigating OER’s can be overwhelming with the amount of sources and content that’s out there, which is why knowing how to use the advanced search options (limiters) is crucial. Limiters help you to filter out what kind of material you are looking for and for what age group since OERs range from K-12. According to Rebecca however, the easiest tip of all is asking your local librarian if they can help you find the materials you are looking for. One of the greatest strengths of OERs is the amount of options available, but this can also make it difficult to figure out where to start. Many librarians will be more than happy to narrow down and suggest certain sites with resources, and will likely be your best bet if you are having trouble.
In order to find OER’s, Rebecca shared some of the most popular search engines:
She also shared some popular referatories and repositories. Referatories link out to OERs on various platforms, whereas repositories are platforms that host the OERs on their own servers.
Referatories:
Repositories:
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