Open educational resources are materials that are openly licensed, typically under a creative commons license, and freely available to use and reuse online. This means that OER are resources that are free of cost and most access barriers.
Not all free resources are open educational resources. In order to qualify as an OER a resource needs to be openly-licensed, freely available, and modifiable.
| Library databases | While library databases are excellent resources and provided free to students and faculty they are not openly licensed material and cannot be modified. These are not Open Educational Resources. |
| Free Web Sources under copyright. | These may be useful resources for a course, but they are not openly licensed, and cannot be modified. They are not Open Educational Resources. |
| Open Access Articles | These resources are openly licensed and freely available but often cannot be modified. They could be valuable resources for your course, but are not Open Educational Resources. |
