OER — What Does That Mean?

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Acronyms are pretty prevalent across the synod and our campus. LES? Lutheran Elementary School. ALHS? Area Lutheran High School. BIC? Bible Information Class. DP? District President.

As we build our CBE (competency-based education) programming at MLC (Martin Luther College), we are adding a few new acronyms to our WELS (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod) vocabulary.

Logo for Open Education Resource

You may have heard our instructional designer or director refer to OER. What is OER?

An OER is an Open Educational Resource. The easiest way to understand OER is to consider each element of the acronym.

Open – OER are publicly available, free resources. These resources are often curated by academic libraries, publishers, museums, and organizations committed to sharing knowledge with others.

Educational – OER are typically created by individual scholars and teachers or groups to share information with others. Many OERs are also peer-reviewed to ensure that the information is accurate.

Resources – They can take many forms, from the OER logo included in this post to a recorded lecture. They can be articles, chapters, and even an entire book. In fact, the Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary maintains a large OER of essay files crafted by scholars from our church body’s beginning through to recent symposia.

There are many benefits to using OER, but we’ll highlight a few here.

  • OER can be integrated into online learning environments in a way that physical resources cannot.
  • OER can incorporate digital media, like videos, interactive charts, and hyperlinks to additional resources, in a way that physical resources cannot.
  • OER are free to instructors and learners.
  • OER are often built to meet accessibility needs, including captioning of video, tagging of images, and screenreader functionality.

The course design process for our competency-based education programming includes an intentional discussion with MLC Librarians, the instructional designer building the course, and the subject matter expert crafting the content to identify appropriate OER materials.