Our OER philosophy

Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational material that are freely available for teachers and students to use, adapt, share, and reuse (Collister, 2019). The QUBES project supports the use of open licensing to make learning resources widely accessible and to provide opportunities for faculty to get professional credit for their teaching scholarship. The use of OER can support Open Educational Practices (OEP) more broadly which promote the use of innovative learning environments and pedagogical strategies. There is emerging evidence that the use of open educational resources can have a positive impact on student academic success and creates more inclusive educational settings (Fischer, et al., 2015).

BioQUEST emphasizes the central role of participation in a scholarly community as a mechanism to advance the development and use of OER. We believe that professional collaborations built around a shared interest and desire to improve and share resources benefits learners in diverse educational contexts. Parallel to the situation in open source software communities, where the users are also developers, QUBES platform users are invited to share their adaptations to existing educational resources through our publishing platform.

OER on QUBES

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  • With 1000 user submitted educational resources, the QUBES platform hosts diverse materials that can be adapted to fit your classroom.
  • New resources are added regularly and cover many topics in biology, mathematics, and data science.
  • The platform also hosts open source software tools.
  • Join a community around the development and use of OER