Open educational resources

A young female student sitting on sofa, using laptop when studying

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning tools that exist in the public domain or are released with intellectual property licenses (usually Creative Commons) allowing their free use, continuous improvement and modification by others.

The OER Commons and MERLOT are digital libraries with expansive collections of open course materials free for you to use in your class. Instructors may contribute to these sites to share their own open educational resources.

The Canvas Commons serves as another source for OER materials. The content stored in the Canvas Commons is generated by Canvas users across multiple education institutions using Canvas. Within the Canvas Commons, instructors may locate educational content to import directly into a Canvas course. Instructors may also contribute to the Canvas Commons by sharing their content.

Pressbooks is a professional self-publishing platform for creating open textbooks. It is available to University of Missouri system instructors for creating open online resources quickly and easily.

Related sprint

Check out the following sprint to learn more about OER in the UM System, strategies to implement them, and tech tools supported by Missouri Online that can be incorporated them into your courses.

Learn about OER
on your campus