Why do open educational resources matter? What is the point of using OER? Below are some of the benefits of using open educational resources that I have seen while working with OER over the past several years.
We intend this book to act as a guide writ large for would-be champions of OER, that anyone called to action by the example set by our chapter authors might serve as guides themselves. The following chapters tap into the deep experience of practitioners who represent a meaningful cross section of higher education institutions in North America. It is our hope that the examples and discussions presented by our authors will facilitate connections among practitioners, foster the development of best practices for OER adoption and creation, and more importantly, lay a foundation for novel, educational excellence.
The OER Adoption Journey is an OER designed to be used as part of a support system for OER adoption in a learning space/course. At its core, this work is about how adopting faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and other supporters think about their approach to OER adoption in support of student learning within a diverse set of learning spaces. It is a model of what integration of multiple OER can look like within learning materials. We created The OER Adoption Journey to support faculty, librarians, and instructional designers working through OER adoption. We invite readers to use the book as is, in support of their OER adoption journey and/or OER adoption initiatives. We invite readers to break our content into modules and sub-modules for your own LMS to support OER adoption on your campus. Then build upon it to meet the needs of your own faculty as they embark on their own OER adoption journey. Modules/chapters within this book are designed for both new and seasoned OER adopters. Use parts as appropriate, revisit parts as appropriate to suit your learning and adopting needs.
The content of this OER was originally designed as a course in a learning management system (LMS) to support a group of Millersville University faculty who were adopting OER for the first time. The OER Adoption Journey goes beyond finding and selecting OER course materials. It contains reflection questions to assist the adopter in thinking through integrating OER into their course in a way that is learner centered.
“This starter kit has been created to provide instructors with an introduction to the use and creation of open educational resources (OER). The text is broken into five sections: Getting Started, Copyright, Finding OER, Teaching with OER, and Creating OER. Although some chapters contain more advanced content, the starter kit is primarily intended for users who are entirely new to Open Education.”
While some of the content included in the handbook is Iowa State University-specific, these examples are few and I have tried to make the text as generalizable as possible. I welcome any comments for potential edits and additions to the text and will add an errata/tracking changes page to the front matter in the future. I especially welcome comments on my Diversity and Inclusion chapter, since I am not the most well-versed on that topic.
If you would like to adapt the text for use at your institution, please let me know so I can add links to your adaptations in the future. If you are interested in working with me on a second edition in the future, feel free to reach out! I’d love to make a more advanced version with additional sections for OER program managers and librarians.
The OER Starter Kit was originally adapted from the ABOER Starter Kit, but blossomed into a much larger project over the past few months. It includes content from Billy Meinke’s excellent UH OER Training manual, SUNY’s wonderful OER Community Courses, and others, all of which can be found on the kit’s Attribution page and on the footnotes of their corresponding chapters.
Trine University promotes the awareness, adoption, adaptation, and creation of open educational resources and no-cost resources for students. This work: “An OER Workshop” by Andrea Bearman is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 and is a derivative work of Creative Commons Certificate for Educators, Academic Librarians, and GLAM. In order to receive a certificate, you must take the course through Creative Commons. This book means to share an abbreviated version of the information with Trine University specifics.
These slides were used to create a 2-min explainer video that illustrates what makes Open Educational Resources so ideal, the rewards of engaging in open pedagogical practices, and a few discipline-specific examples. Adapt it and share it!
The BCcampus Open Education OER by Discipline Directory lists a wide range of open educational resources organized by discipline. This directory is updated as new resources are identified. Note that textbooks in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection are not included in this directory.
This guide is indexed by subjects and links to open resources (Creative Commons, Open Access (OA), governmental). Most resources will have the license indicated at the end of the description.
The Open Educational Resources (OER) in Texas Statewide Playbook is a resource developed by practitioners and advocates actively involved in the labor of open education to guide new and expanding OER work at institutions of higher education. The Playbook is the result of partnerships between the Division of Digital Learning, the Institution for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) – creators of OER Commons and experts in open education practice and research – and faculty, librarians, staff, and administrators from institutions and systems across Texas. It aims to support institutions as they work to build capacity and drive systems change around OER. It also serves as a guiding document for institutions that have not yet engaged in OER work or taken advantage of existing programs and opportunities. The hope is that the Texas OER Playbook will serve as a companion on the journey towards OER awareness and advocacy at your institution.
This resource is intended to provide practitioners with introductory, practical content that they can learn from and adapt to better support their own campus Open Education efforts, particularly Open Pedagogy. It is not intended to be an extensive or exhaustive resource about the educational theories and frameworks out of which Open Pedagogy has emerged, as there are several other wonderful resources that cover that information. It includes a podcast series of teaching faculty interviews that will be helpful for other faculty seeking to learn more about their peers’ experiences with open pedagogy, and librarians will benefit from hearing firsthand perspectives so they can better understand the necessary support. Also included are one-shot lesson plans intended to assist academic librarians tasked with supporting faculty embarking on open pedagogy projects, however, we recognize that it often takes a village, and individuals in other roles will also benefit from these (adaptable) lesson plans.
Based on the Open Textbook Network Workshop, this asynchronous workshop allows educators flexibility to engage with and interact with the materials outside of a traditional in-person workshop using Springshare's LibWizard tutorial platform. Topics in this workshop include:Introduction to OER (open educational resources)Review of the cost of higher educationReview of the textbook publishing industryIntroduction to efficacy and perceived quality of open textbooksThe attached text file includes the html code. We've also included links to a README document that describes the step-by-step process of recreating this tutorial in LibWizard and the list of in-workshop questions and answers for each section of the workshop. This should be everything you need to recreate the aynchronous workshop.NOTE: Archives of old versions of the html code can be found in this Google Drive folder.
The online educational resource Physics For Everyone is the scaffolding for a 3 contact hour, 3 credit general education course that conveys the relevance, beauty, and power of physics as a foundation of science and technology in the public interest.
This slide deck provides the outline for the semester-long course. Each week’s lecture topics, with key points to be covered, are highlighted in two slides, which also list writing prompts, problem-solving exercises, and labs. Also, we have curated a list of high-quality online video resources that students (and instructors) should use to help them learn (and teach) physics ideas and concepts using demonstrations, animations, and humor. Many of those videos are parts of larger series and programs, created by some of the most skilled and popular online presenters in the world; that means some of their content is commercially sponsored, but all the content is free to students and instructors. Finally, we have envisioned this course so that students are assessed with a large set of low-stakes, just-in-time-type assignments and laboratory exercises.
This work has been generously supported by New America’s PIT-UN (Public Interest Technology University Network) challenge grant program, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Pressbooks is an Open Textbook platform. This Open (Canvas LMS) course demonstrates various methods of placing an open Pressbooks textbook in Canvas, including as a Navigation menu item and as links, PDFs or pages within Modules. It also includes various methods of providing students with a print version.
The practice of adding either OER or no-cost/low-cost materials designators in course catalogs is on the rise, aiming to give more visibility and transparency to students and administrators as to which courses offer these more affordable options. Few formal reports have been published on the implementation and impact of OER/No Cost/Low Cost designations integrated into course schedules at colleges and universities. This booklet aims to lessen the literature gap by providing written accounts of the course marking drivers, implementation strategies, challenges, and lessons learned presented by panelists at the 16th Annual Open Education Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, in October 2019.
Reality Czech is a next generation openly licensed Czech textbook and curriculum currently under development by Dr. Christian Hilchey from the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies in collaboration with the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, a series of videos are available on the website.
Eventually, all materials will be freely available online under a Creative Commons license to any university or individuals who wish to use or adapt them:
- In-class Activity Book
- Online Grammar and Cultural Units
- Printable Homework Exercises
This is an OER on creating OER. The book includes helpful descriptions of considerations authors should take on the front end as they write Openly licensed material, and provides lots of troubleshooting for common problems authors experience.
Ryerson Open Moments is a book that describes the journeys of eight educators who came to discover open education through projects in which they developed open educational resources. Each of these stories recounts a different journey towards open and what open education comes to mean for each of our storytellers. These stories vary based on their goals, their experiences of teaching, and the types of projects they pursued.
This book is a practical guide to adapting or creating open textbooks using the Pressbooks platform. It is continually evolving as new information, practices and processes are developed. The primary audience for this book is community members at Ryerson University, Ontario who are interested in creating Open Educational Resources; however, there may be content within this book that is useful to others working on similar Open Educational Resource initiatives.
One of the greatest areas of potential for open educational resources (OER) is the opportunity for improved representation and coverage of identities that often go erased or poorly addressed in educational materials. Information about, by, and for trans and gender diverse people is one such topic. With knowledge and intention, those involved in the creation, adaptation, and use of OER can find and incorporate materials that center trans and gender diverse people. Doing this is essential for supporting trans and gender diverse students and educating everyone about these identities. This resource is a guide on how to make OER more inclusive and representative of trans and gender diverse people. It is intended to be easily incorporated into a scholarly communications course, while also being valuable to faculty and others interested in learning about the topic and how to make changes to their own course materials.
A three-part training guide for bringing higher education instructors up to speed with Open Educational Resources (OER). This book was developed to serve as a standalone guide for independent creators and to support OER training through face-to-face, online, and hybrid delivery modes.