About the Open Dental Ed Consortium

The Open Dental Education Consortium was established to create and freely share the best educational materials available to train our dentists, hygienists, dental therapists, expanded function dental auxiliaries, and dental assistants of tomorrow. By sharing our content freely with the world, we hope to nurture an ethic of openness and human-centered learning in dental education and oral health by reducing learner costs, improving educational access, creating more flexible learning opportunities, and providing the most up-to-date and useful information for all learners.

Funding Notice

The contents of this site were developed under a grant from the Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials that are provided in a manner that allows them to be freely revised, remixed, reused, redistributed, and retained (Wiley, n.d.). OER provide a vision for education and a mechanism for sharing that encourages generosity and fosters ongoing improvement (Kimmons, 2021; Kimmons & Irvine, 2023; Wiley et al., 2020), thereby leading our educational systems to become higher-quality and more accessible to all.

We only include content on this site that is gratis (free as in no cost), but not all content may provide freedoms to users for remixing, etc. (free as in freedom). Each book included in this site is released under its own license, and some include chapters or other content that may be released under yet another license. If you have questions about reuse, remixing, etc., please consult the copyright notice on the individual work. To learn more about licensing and copyright, check out this introductory chapter on the topic.

Ownership

By hosting or linking to content on this site, we do not claim ownership of the content, and we or our partners should not be viewed as supporting the veracity or opinions of content authors. All specific content items merely reflect the opinions of their authors.

References

Kimmons, R. (2021). A/B testing on open textbooks: A feasibility study for continuously improving open educational resources. The Journal of Applied Instructional Design, 10(2).

Kimmons, R., & Irvine, J. (2023). Future Directions in OER. In D. Otto, M. Kerres, & O. Zawacki-Richter (Eds.), Distributed learning ecosystems: Repositories, resources and practices. Springer Nature.

Wiley, D., Strader, R., & Bodily, R. (2020). Continuous improvement of instructional materials. In J. K. McDonald & R. E. West (Eds.), Design for learning: Principles, processes, and praxis. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/id/continuous_improvement