Research Guides: Affordable Course Materials and Open Educational Resources (OER) for Faculty: Adapt/Create/Share OER

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

BC Campus OER Toolkit
Toolkit for adopting, modifying and creating OER from BC Campus.
BC Campus OER Adaption Guide
Detailed and informative guide for modifying existing OER from BC Campus.
Creative Commons Licenses
Complete information on licensing information under Creative Commons.
Open Washington Attribution Builder
Tool from Open Washington to help you easily cite open material you find; as you fill out the form the application will automatically generate the attribution for you.

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.

OER Common Open Author
Now you can ensure your resources are accessible to people with disabilities with the Acessibility Checker - build right into our editor and designed to keep you compliant with WCAG 2.O, WAI-ARIA, and more.
OpenStax CNX: Create a module
See also how to create adaptations of existing OpenStax CNX content.

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:

Decide where they might go (general or disciplinary repository)
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?
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?
Craft metadata for the object. What terms can you use to make your OER more discoverable?
Licensing! Look at the CC website to decide what’s right for you. What are your intentions for the object?
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.
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]