Open Educational Resources
What is the difference between a 'free' resource and an 'open' one?
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are, and will always be, free, but not all free resources are OERs. Free resources may be temporarily free or may be restricted from use at some time in the future (including by the addition of fees to access the resource). Moreover, free-but-not-open resources may not be modified, adapted, or redistributed without obtaining special permission from the copyright holder.
How do you tell if an educational resource is an OER?
The key distinguishing characteristic of OER is its intellectual property license and the freedoms the license grants to others to share and adapt it. If a lesson plan or activity is not clearly tagged or marked as being in the public domain or having an open license, it is not OER. It’s that simple. The most common way to release materials as OER is through Creative Commons copyright licenses, which are standardized, free-to-use open licenses that have already been used on more than 1 billion copyrighted works.
What makes an open textbook different from a traditional textbook?
Traditionally-published textbooks are produced under closed copyright, meaning they cannot be shared, re-used or re-purposed. They are usually costly (hundreds of dollars each) with new editions published frequently, making texts only a year or two old out of date. Even if they are published digitally at half the cost, they are still expensive and come with digital rights management that means they only appear for a short period of time (4-6 months) on a student’s e-reader.
The open licensing of open textbooks allows for collaborations on and improvements to textbooks from contributors around the world. In contrast to traditional textbooks, with open licenses, faculty are free to adapt any portion of a textbook without requiring students to purchase an entire book only to use a small portion.
Leganto Course Reading Lists
Can the library scan chapters or obtain permission to copy materials for my reading list?
Yes. Yes. Under Fair Dealing, the library can digitize limited portions of books or articles (up to 10 percent or one chapter). If you need more than Fair Dealing allows, we will request copyright clearance on your behalf. Clearance can take a week or longer, so please submit your request well before your course begins.
Can I create a Leganto Reading list for cross listed courses?
Yes. If your course is cross-listed, please wait until your course sites are consolidated to submit your list. If you are not consolidating courses, you will need to ask us to duplicate your list for each course. (courseresources@uwindsor.ca)
Can I access and work on my Leganto Reading list if I don't a course site?
Yes. Instructors can also login, access and edit their resource list in our system independently of Brightspace. So if your site is down, or you don't have your course site yet, you can still work on your resource list.
Can I send a reading list generated by Generative AI?
Please be sure to provide us with full and accurate citation information for all resources so that we can ensure they are available to your students. As you may already know, if you're using generative AI to help you generate lists, they can at times generate fake citations which may look real and even include real author names and real journal titles, but the articles may not exist.
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