OER Use Options
When you're looking at options for using OER in your course, you have a few options: you can choose to adopt materials as-is, adapt materials to better meet your needs, or create new materials to share openly with other instructors. Use the following tabs to learn more about each of these options.
There are many high-quality, peer-reviewed Open Educational Resources across various academic disciplines and topics. After identifying OER in your course area, you may not need to edit or otherwise alter them for use in your syllabus. Additionally, instructor materials such as discussion questions, quizzes, and exams may be available.
Adopting these materials "as-is" by integrating the materials into Canvas or simply linking to the website where the material(s) are hosted online is the most straightforward and the least time-intensive way to include OER in your course.
Example:
- Professor Dawson will begin teaching the History of United States course series and would like to adopt the open textbook, American Yawp from Stanford University Press. This will require revising the curriculum. Fortunately, the American Yawp website also provides teaching materials that include sample course syllabi, exams, quizzes, and essay assignments, in addition to a primary source reader.
Resources to get you started:
- OER Training Handbook
A three-part training guide from the University of Hawaii designed to bring higher education instructors up to speed with Open Educational Resources (OER).
Suppose there are available OER related to your curriculum, but they are dated, too broad, or contain information that is beyond the scope of your course. In that case, you may want to consider modifying the materials.
Alternately, if there are OER available on the topic your course covers, but no single resource is broad enough to cover the needs of your course, you may want to consider compiling a selection of various OER, free online materials, and websites that make up the resources for use in a class. OER adaption possibilities are nearly limitless due to the digital nature of OER!
After confirming that the Creative Commons license attached to the materials allows for adaptation, you may choose to edit the materials to tailor them to your course. Alterations can be as simple as changing graphics, reorganizing chapters, deleting content that isn't relevant, or as intensive as revising the materials to incorporate additional OER sources or content you create yourself.
Example:
- The publisher Professor Yamata uses for their Biological Psychology course now requires an access code. To ensure that students retain materials after the end of the quarter, they plan to adopt the open textbook Psychology as a Biological Science from the Noba platform. The Noba textbook does not cover neural networks at the level of detail needed for this class, so to address this gap, Professor Yamata will also incorporate sections of the open textbook Foundations of Neuroscience. Additionally, they plan to curate openly licensed videos from TedEd and images from the Open Neuroscience Initiative.
Resources to get you started:
- Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know
Step-by-step guide to modifying an open textbook. Includes instructions for importing and editing common open textbook file and platform types. - 6 Steps to modifying an Open Textbook
Once you have made the decision to adopt an open textbook, you may wish to modify or adapt that textbook to fit your specific needs. Here are six steps to consider before modifying or adapting an existing textbook. - Adaptable OER
A guide for faculty interested in creating or adapting OER.
If there are no appropriate OER available on your topic or if you have course materials that you believe are superior to the OER available online, you may want to consider creating or licensing your own course materials. Authoring Open Educational Resources can be as simple as applying an open licensee and sharing the syllabus you currently use or sharing lesson plans on OER repositories like OER Commons.
Other OER creation processes can be more complex, such as authoring open textbooks. You can work with the AggieOpen team and/or pursue an AggieOpen Fellows grant to support your work.
Example:
- Professors Aquino, Hamasyan, and Jorgensen plan to adapt the open textbook Introduction to Environmental Science. Hoping to make the course materials more relevant to their students, they plan to create case studies, discussion questions, and assignments for each chapter that are regionally focused on California ecosystems and populations. These materials will be uploaded in Cool 4 Ed to share with other instructors across the three California higher education systems.
- Professors Parandvash and Dupin would like to use an open textbook for their Elementary Persian courses, but there is no OER designed for first-year Persian language students at the college level. They plan to publish on the LibreText platform using LibreStudio to create interactive learning materials for students' language labs (dictation, flashcards, and games).
Resources to get you started:
- Authoring Open Textbooks
This guide is for faculty authors, librarians, project managers and others who are involved in the production of open textbooks. Content includes a checklist for getting started, publishing program case studies, textbook organization, writing resources and an overview of useful tools. - A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students
A handbook for faculty interested in practicing open pedagogy by involving students in the making of open textbooks, ancillary materials, or other Open Educational Resources. - Open Education Self-Publishing GuideThis guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook. Copyright, open-copyright licenses, and the differences between citation and attribution are discussed as well as copy editing and proofreading. Checklists and templates are also provided.
- OERI Accessibility and Universal Design Guide
Accessibility Basics – What every faculty member should know
Building with accessibility in mind is always preferable over having to modify your work after it has been completed.
Attribution
- OER options adapted from the “Where to Start” page from the Iowa State University Library OER guide by Abby Elder CC BY 4.0