Open Educational Resources

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

Open educational resources (OER) are free assets that are licensed for reuse in teaching and learning. OER can help instructors offset textbook costs for their students, but the impact extends beyond textbooks. It allows instructors greater freedom in assembling their course and offering new ways to empower students.

How is Mimir Supporting OER?

Foremost, Mimir Classroom is a curriculum and textbook-agnostic platform that helps computer science instructors assess student work, provide quicker feedback, and automatically detect plagiarism. To help computer science instructors and students achieve the next level of cost savings, we turned to the rising cost of textbooks.

We Empower Our Customers

When we began working with Dave Ghidiu from Finger Lakes Community College, he showed us how he utilized OER to reduce textbook costs and improve the quality of learning experiences for his students. Here's how we worked with Dave to accomplish his goals.

 

Even though we help instructors deliver a better learning experience to students without compromising the quality of education through our core product, Mimir Classroom, we wanted to do more. In the Spring of 2018, we added free resources to Mimir Classroom to supplement the courses instructors were already teaching.

That's why in the Fall of 2018, we decided to take it a step further and make a commitment to CSforAll, a collaborative community of more than 550 organizations, and the national hub for the Computer Science for All movement.

CSforAll Commitment 2018

The result is Open CS1, a commitment that we have made as part of the 2018 CSforALL Summit.

 

Mimir, in collaboration with instructors from Mississippi State University, Ohlone College, and ten other U.S. universities, will develop and pilot eight units of free CS course materials to improve adoption of free digital textbooks and reduce costs for students.

 

Our target is to help 1,800 students save a combined $135,000 before the end of 2019.

 

Read the full commitment here.

OER Content Meets Mimir Classroom

For instructors who are interested in exploring more of the features within Mimir Classroom, these same OER materials have been remixed and added to our global content library. Since instructor accounts are always free, it's easy to get started.