UW-Superior's OER Program is led by the Markwood Center for Learning, Innovation & Collaboration's (CLIC) OER Committee. Established in 2020, the committee's goal is to make education more affordable for all UW-Superior students and holds various professional development programs for instructors to teach them about finding, using, and developing OERs:
Forty-two instructors and staff have participated in the CLIC's OER Program since 2021, savings students $111,932 in course material costs!
To contact the OER Committee, please email committee chair Emily Moran at emoran4@uwsuper.edu.
During the 2024-25 academic year, UW's Office of Academic Affairs created an OER Community of Practice to bring together UW's institutions to start a system-wide grant initiative and to establish OER support at the system level. Visit UW's OER website and UW's Pressbooks network for more information.
Open Education Resources are “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions” (UNESCO). OERs provide the public with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:
The above is adapted from original writing by David Wiley, published under a CC BY 4.0 license.
There are several reasons you might wish to use an OER in the classroom:
OERs are made possible by Creative Commons (CC) Licenses, also called open licenses. CC Licenses fall under Copyright Law. Whereas traditionally copyrighted material are all rights reserved, openly licensed materials have some rights reserved. This is dependent on which of the six CC licenses that a creator chooses to attach to their work and distribute to the public online.
For more information about CC Licenses, please visit the following resources:
Watch the video below to learn more about the six CC licenses:
"Anatomy of a Creative Commons License" by Emily Moran is licensed by a CC BY 4.0 license.