Open Educational Resources

man mohan / iStock / Getty Images Plus

Our make-believe faculty member (let’s call her Rita) knows little about OERs and needs to get a basic understanding of what they are and how they work. 

Rita has no idea what OERs are.

A Quick Guide to Open Educational Resources (OERs) by Georgia State University Library is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. UMGC has modified this work and it is available under the original license.

Rita has no idea where to start, so she needs information on how to search for and find OERs online.

How to Find and Evaluate OER by Abbey Alder from YouTube is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Rita wants to learn more about CC licenses and how they work so she'll know which CC-licensed OERs to choose.

Creative Commons - What does it mean? by Martin Missfeldt is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. UMGC has modified this work and it is available under the original license.

Our beleaguered faculty member needs help devising effective search strategies to find the OERs she’s most interested in.

Online Research: Tips for Effective Search Strategies by Sarah Clark from YouTube is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Rita now has several open resources that address the key topics in her course, but she needs help with evaluating the quality and appropriateness of each resource.

Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Education Resources by BCOER Librarians from BCcampus is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. UMGC has modified this work and it is available under the original license.

• Rubrics for Evaluating Open Educational Resources (OER) Objects
  • Produced by the group Achieve.org, this tool includes eight key rubrics and four values that can be used to assess the quality and applicability of all components in an open educational resource.
• UMGC OER Quality Guide
  • The UMGC OER Quality Guide is a tool to help evaluate the quality of OERs for use in your course. It examines resources through multiple lenses: compliance, content considerations, and technical factors.
• OER Assessment Rubric
  • An OER quality assessment tool that includes twenty rubrics—from author knowledge and authenticity to issues of accessibility—and four rankings—from N/A to Good—that users can assign when evaluating the quality of OERs they want to use.
• Evaluating Resources
  • A list of key criteria for evaluating OER created by Affordable Learning Georgia.

Rita wants to learn how to modify OERs to suit her needs.

License Compatibility Chart by Creative Commons is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. UMGC has modified this work and it is available under the original license.

Rita is interested in getting ideas for the best way to adopt OERs in her course.

Open Dialogues: How to Engage and Support Students in Open Pedagogies by Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia from YouTube is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Now that she has located, modified, and developed new OERs for her course, Rita wants to share these resources with other faculty and instructors. What options does she have?

• Create Open Textbooks
  • BCcampus webpage that provides links to various guides for publishing open textbooks, as well as details of how to use the Pressbooks platform.
• Pressbooks
  • Home page for the authoring and courseware platform Pressbooks, with numerous links for faculty authors, self-publishers, and educational institutions .
• The LaTeX Project
  • LaTeX is a typesetting and publishing software platform designed for scientific and technical publications, including journal articles, technical reports, books, and slide presentations.
• Lulu
  • Lulu is a free online self-publishing and print-on-demand company for all kinds of authors, including faculty, who want to typeset and publish their books.
• GitBook
  • GitBook is an opensource tool that allows users to easily create documentation for both internal and external customers; GitBook is a shareable service that helps users collaborate, create, edit, and ultimately publish all types of documents.

Rita has completed her OER journey. Not only did she learn about open educational resources and Creative Commons licensing, she also learned how to find and adopt OERs. She is now able to modify and remix OERs so that they better align with her course objectives, and to publish these new resources on the internet, so that others can benefit from her work.

man mohan / iStock / Getty Images Plus

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. © 2021, UMGC.