Open Educational Resources

Since its inception, The NROC Project has been dedicated to creating and maintaining open educational resources (OER), including free educational websites and digital textbooks, designed to broaden learners’ access to high-quality educational opportunities.

Access, adapt, remix, and freely share these award-winning resources.

OER for Adult Education

EdReady.org and HippoCampus.org have been optimized for the needs of adult education programs. Use the links below to explore our open educational resources for adult learners.

How to Use Open Educational Resources

Our Commitment to Sustainable Open Educational Resources

NROC has always considered the full lifecycle of OER development, distribution, and sustainability. We believe we can best achieve our mission by applying a spectrum of openness, where the rights granted accrue to the people who will benefit most and are well matched to the typical person’s capacity for making adaptations. We provide support to individuals, institutions, and other partners across this spectrum. The image above illustrates how NROC’s current suite of solutions can be mapped against varying levels of a priori openness and reflects the following priorities:

  • We believe individuals should be able to use our text-based materials and web-based tools, HippoCampus and EdReady, without constraints.
  • We ask institutions—of any form—to contribute to the maintenance of these resources and to the sustainability of The NROC Project. Otherwise, we try to eliminate arbitrary barriers to maximizing usage and customization.
  • We can balance these expectations and preserve the quality and functionality inherent in our multimedia courses and EdReady (as it is implemented by an educational institution, which includes the right to access student data) by restricting some institutional rights, but not individual rights.

The fees from NROC’s institutional partners, coupled with occasional grant funding from our foundation partners (including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation), make it possible to sustain our ongoing efforts to create, update, and refine NROC courses and tools. This model empowers us to support and redistribute our OER as well as the works of incredible content partners, like PhET.

  • We build and maintain platforms that enable people to find OER materials and engage in OER practices, including adaptation and customization.
  • Our commitment to OER is linked to a singular focus: improved student outcomes.
  • Our partnership model ensures that exceptional OER are not shelved because a temporary funding source expires.

Three overlapping circles contain a vast amount of text attempting to show that some resources are available for free use and others are not so much
More open to less open: NROC resources for individual use and for institutional use