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Affordable Course Materials and Open Educational Resources (OER) for Faculty


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Looking for OERs in Spanish?

Check the LibreTexts Español Library for OERs covering biology, business, social sciences, math, and more.

 

Permissions Guide For Educators

This guide is intended to support curriculum developers--including educators, curriculum experts, librarians, and others--in determining the legal ways that they can use digital resources created by others in their own lessons and collections. 

The guide also serves as a primer on how to seek permission to use resources that are currently under copyright. It includes considerations around whether to ask for permission, as well as resources to aid in conversations and negotiations with rights holders.

OER Commons

Guide Copyright, Permissions, and Attributions

This research guide was produced by Nicole Arnold and Nicole Carpenter, built off the work of Allegra Swift at UCSD and Elizabeth Salmon at UC Merced.

Adopting & Adapting OER

Authoring Tools in OER Repositories

If you have found OER to adapt or remix, you should first check to see if there are any built-in authoring tools available from the repository where you found the OER. Below are tutorials of authoring tools in various OER repositories.

Other Editing/Publishing Options

Below are some possible free tools you could use to create/adapt OER:

Free Tools to Create/Adapt OER
Documents Images Audio Video eBook publishing
OpenOffice
Google Doc
Pixlr
Be Funky
PicMonkey
(source: Wikipedia)
Audacity iMovie
YouTube Video Editor
PAGES
XanEdu
Lulu

 

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 SUNY 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.

Sharing Existing Learning Objects

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 (for example, if you created a class on WWI Literature, it might be useful for others to see your assigned readings and activities) 
  • 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 for them to go there. 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? What’s the language use (very technical or introductory)? 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 licences, use the Creative Commons License Compatibility Wizards to help you determine whether there will be compatibility issues.
  7. Refer to CC attribution guide and write apporpriate citations for resources you used. The suggested citation format is: [Title] by [Author], used under [CC BY Licence]