OER For Faculty

Below are some resources for adapting, creating, and sharing your own OER:

• Open Textbook Adoption Worksheet (Community College Consortium) Created by Dr. Judy Baker, Director of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, this resource simplifies the process of finding and adopting an open textbook.

• Modifying an Open Textbook Details 6 basic steps to modifying and hosting an existing open textbook or other OER.

• OpenStax CNX: Localization and OER "In the context of OER, localization refers to the process of taking educational resources developed for one context and adapting them for other contexts. These contexts can, for example, be geographical, pedagogical, political, or technical. The practice of localization encompasses more than the translation of materials into a local language or swapping a photo to reflect a culture. Localization is at the heart of the OER process—it exemplifies diversity, openness, and reusability."

• OER Commons Open Author

  If the OER was originally composed by an Open Author in OER Commons, and has been given use licenses that allow for editing and remixing, you may use the "remix this resource" option to copy and edit the resource.

• Choose a Creative Commons License

*Note: adapted from Kirkwood Community College Library's guide on open textbooks

Some free tools you might use to create/adapt OER:

Also, see a list of free and/or open source OER Authoring Tools that you can use to create, adapt or remix OER of different types, curated by the Empire State College's library.

OER Authoring Tools guide, created by Sarah Morehouse is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

You probably have already created potential OER and just haven't thought about them as resources you might be able to share! OER take the shape of different resources, including (but not limited to):

• Syllabi and courses created 
• Videos/ tutorials on a specific topic
• Worksheets
• Group activities
• Writing prompts
• Tests, quizzes, and other assessments
• Lesson plans
• Research assignments and activities

If you'd like to share one of your learning objects as an OER, think about the following:

1. Decide where they might go (general or disciplinary repository)
2. Find out what the requirements are to deposit them. Do they need to be in a specific format? What metadata entry is required?
3. Rank / evaluate your OER. What level is it intended for? Can you add instructions / tips on how you used it?
4. Craft metadata for the object. What terms can you use to make your OER more discoverable?
5. Licensing! Look at the CC website to decide what’s right for you. What are your intentions for the object?
6. If you are remixing several OER which were published under different licenses, use the Creative Commons License Compatibility Wizard to help you determine whether there will be compatibility issues.
7. Refer to CC attribution guide and write appropriate citations for resources you used. The suggested citation format is: [Title] by [Author], used under [CC BY License]