Learn More About OERs
OER Readings
SPARC Open Education Factsheet
- A factsheet from Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) summarizing the what, why, and how of open education.
What Are The Impacts of Adopting OER?
- Change the values to match data from Pacific and see how OER adoption can benefit our students and institution.
Opening the Textbook: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education
- Babson Survey Research Group - OER Reports since 2012
- A 242 page OA book from MIT Press by an OA expert
Modifying Open Textbooks
Modifying an Open Textbook by Cheryl Cuillier, Amy Hofer, Annie Johnson, Kathleen Labadorf, Karen Lauritsen, Peter Potter, Richard Saunders, Anita Walz
- This is a five-step guide for faculty, and those who support faculty, who want to modify an open textbook. Step-by-step instructions for importing and editing common open textbook file and platform types are included.
6 Steps to Modifying an Open Textbook by BCcampus
- Covers license checking, original format, editing tools, license application, output format, and hosting.
Authoring Open Textbooks
Authoring Open Textbooks by Melissa Falldin and Karen Lauritsen
- This guide is for faculty authors, librarians, project managers and others who are involved in the production of open textbooks in higher education and K-12. Content includes a checklist for getting started, publishing program case studies, textbook organization and elements, writing resources and an overview of useful tools.
Tools for Creating Content
- "Create Open Educational Resources (on your own, or with others) with our publishing tools. Our authoring tools help you build OER, lesson plans, and courses—and then publish them, to the benefit of educators and learners everywhere. Learn more about creating on OER Commons and get started."
- "View and share free educational material in small modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports or other academic assignments."
- "Pressbooks is easy-to-use book writing software that lets you create a book in all the formats you need to publish."
- "Build a lesson around any TED-ED Original, TED Talk or YouTube Video"
- "Webpages are easily created using Content Builder's templates. These include a variety of designs including e-portfolio structures, lesson plans, author guidelines, quality assurance, teaching tips, course redesign, online course, etc."
- "With an online course, you can build a classroom anyone can access, from anywhere. You can teach potential students anything — from physics to philosophy to community-building. Whatever your subject, you can build a course with lessons, assessments, and interactive assignments."
Copyright/Fair Use and Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons licensing is at the heart of the OER movement. CC allows creators to specify flexible forms of copyright that allows "others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work." These licenses provide varying amounts of protection, ranging from “all rights reserved" (full copyright) to “no rights reserved" (public domain). To read more about each license, click here.
Have Copyright or Fair Use questions not covered here? Check out the Library's Copyright Libguide or contact a Librarian.
