Open Educational Resources (OER): Support for Academic Staff
Discover how Open Educational Resources (OER) can enrich your teaching, support our students, and develop open pedagogy.
The Library provides expertise and tools to help you discover, adapt, and create high-quality OER.
What are Open Educational Resources?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are bespoke published resources designed to meet course/classroom needs. The copyright of these resources are retained by an author – not the publisher, and are adaptable and accessible to other academics for their own intended learning outcomes (ILOs).
OER have many benefits to both the student and the academic. They are more flexible and accessible than traditional textbooks and journals, meaning academics can have more curriculum / course design control, as they build OER to fulfil course needs and create student-centred learning resources. As they are Open Access, OER support lifelong learning, and are available post-graduation, thus improving the alumni experience.
The most pressing issue in textbook provision is the escalating cost of textbooks, both for individual students, but also on an institutional basis, with academic library models that are either very costly or highly restrictive.
OER reduce the financial burden to the University and our students. They provide free or low-cost alternatives to traditional textbooks and course materials. The Library is seeking to offer a range of tools and services for customising and adapting open content solutions to suit specific educational needs and we want our academic colleagues to collaborate with us in developing, tailoring, and potentially funding these resources to their reading lists and wider teaching.
Institutional OER Policy and Principles
The University of Salford now supports the principle of free access to reliable academic information as part of a tailored, accessible and enduring learning experience. Open Educational Resources (OER) are an opportunity for academics and students to reclaim learning as a public good from expensive commercial publishing. Academics who wish to explore OER as a publishing alternative to textbooks can now get advice on this from Library, Careers and Enterprise.
You can get advice on copyright from the Library. We also provide an open access user guide on Creative Commons Licences.
Our plans for OER align with the University of Salford Strategy 2025-30: Innovating to Enrich Lives. OER will contribute to our commitments on innovation by flexibly meeting inclusive teaching and learning challenges, adapting to changes in our teaching and learning offer, and increasing social and economic inclusivity. The open nature of OER means they can align with global engagement objectives; create a more sustainable learning experience; and provide for increased flexibility in lifelong learning experiences – all of which are strategic objectives outlined by Universities UK.
OER Resources
We recommend that you start with the following resources:
- UK and Ireland OER Community of Practice is a collaboration between the Open Education Network and higher education institutions in the UK and Ireland. Our goal is to bring together open education practitioners in the region to support one another in advancing open education, making higher education more accessible and affordable for students.
- Mason OER Metafinder searches many of the most well-known OER repositories.
Further resources
- LibreTexts is a multi-institutional collaborative project that offers free textbooks and learning materials across multiple academic disciplines.
- MIT OpenCourseWare provides access to MIT course content, including syllabi, lectures, and more.
- OASIS is a search engine that enables federated searching across many OER platforms.
- OER Commons is a digital library offering open educational resources, including textbooks, across various subjects and education levels.
- Open Book Publishers produce a list of their OA textbooks and catalogued OA textbooks All Books | Thoth (click the Textbooks option).
- Open Textbook Library is hosted by the University of Minnesota in the US and provides a vast range of open textbooks that are freely available and can be modified and redistributed.
- OpenStax is a nonprofit organisation that offers high-quality, peer-reviewed, and free open textbooks for college courses across various subjects. These resources have a US focus.
- UCL Press has launched a new programme of open access textbooks, for undergraduate and postgraduate courses and modules, across a variety of disciplines.
Creating and publishing OER
Open Educational Resources (OER) provide academics with significant advantages that extend beyond their classrooms, making their teaching and scholarship more impactful, visible, and accessible.
A key benefit is the ability to reach a broader audience, since OER are freely available rather than locked behind paywalls or costly textbooks. This openness amplifies the influence of an academic’s work and can broaden scholarly visibility, as open materials are more easily cited, reused, and shared, leading to new opportunities for collaboration and recognition in the field.
OER also encourage innovation in teaching, since they can be revised, remixed, and updated in ways that static, proprietary resources cannot. This flexibility allows educators to tailor content to the needs of their students and experiment with creative pedagogical approaches.
Another advantage lies in equity and inclusion: by removing financial barriers, OER help students who struggle with the rising costs of learning materials.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are bespoke published resources designed to meet course/classroom needs. The copyright of these resources are retained by an author – not the publisher, and are adaptable and accessible to other academics for their own intended learning outcomes (ILOs).
There are lots of authoring tools available. We recommend this guide from the University of Texas Library.
Support and training offered by Library
There is lots of support material available to help you get going. The following links are a great introduction to key platforms and current thinking on the application of OER to teaching and learning.
OER can be added to your reading lists just like any other resource. We have some really simple instructions available on our Reading Lists web page for staff. In addition to this, see how you can integrate your OER into your pedagogical practice.
If you have a question about OER, please speak with your Academic Support Librarian in the first instance. They may refer you on to the Open Research Team. There are links to further contacts on our Support for academic staff web page.
Communities and collaboration
These platforms build their own Community of Practice (CoP) that guides and advise on OER creation, usage, development and their application to learning needs. Here is the CoP for the OER Commons. There is also a UK and Ireland CoP network to subscribe to. Other UK institutions, such as the University of Leeds and the University of Sheffield provide OER policy and support for their academics, as well as case studies which you may find useful.
OER networks provide advice and guidance on submission, peer preview, quality appraisal and review ratings. As an example, here is the Peer Review guidance for the MERLOT OER platform, with advice on how to become a peer reviewer and author. Becoming a reviewer first is a great way to get started with building your own OER.