Open Educational Resources (OER) in Fluid Mechanics

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching resources that are freely available in the public domain. They include textbooks, videos, lecture notes, problem sets, software and more. They differ from Open Access in that they are published under a license that permits free use, re-distribution, and modifications (re-mixing) although attribution is still required. Like the rest of the publishing industry, teaching resources for fluids have been disrupted by technology. Nevertheless, there are limited OER resources available to instructors and students of fluid mechanics. In this talk I’ll list some of the OER aimed at graduate and undergraduate fluids courses (including my Flow Visualization book) and facilitate a discussion about the pros and cons of OER for our community. For example, traditionally published textbooks are intensively reviewed and edited, while OER textbooks often are not. Authors of traditionally published texts are paid royalties in addition to institutional support, while OER authors are only supported by their institutions. Is author support independent of the value of the contributed material? How can we make OER work for us?