Open Educational Resources

Getting Started: What is an Open Educational Resource? 
  • What are Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources? From BCcam­pus: short con­cise descrip­tion of what an Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resource is, the rela­tion­ship to open ped­a­gogy and some ben­e­fits of using OERs. Includes links to fur­ther read­ings. 
  • Open Edu­ca­tion Primer  From SPARC* An overview of OER and Open edu­ca­tion­al prac­tices. It is a liv­ing document/textbook. “Wel­come to the Open Text­book Primer, the text­book for the SPARC Open Edu­ca­tion Lead­er­ship Pro­gram. This resource is intend­ed to pro­vide an intro­duc­tion to open edu­ca­tion for aca­d­e­m­ic librar­i­ans in North Amer­i­ca, with empha­sis on the three pil­lars of resources, prac­tices, and pol­i­cy.  “
    • FYI: From Sparcopen.org “SPARC (the Schol­ar­ly Pub­lish­ing and Aca­d­e­m­ic Resources Coali­tion) works to enable the open shar­ing of research out­puts and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als in order to democ­ra­tize access to knowl­edge, accel­er­ate dis­cov­ery, and increase the return on our invest­ment in research and edu­ca­tion. As a cat­a­lyst for action, SPARC focus­es on col­lab­o­rat­ing with oth­er stakeholders—including authors, pub­lish­ers, libraries, stu­dents, fun­ders, pol­i­cy­mak­ers and the public—to build on the oppor­tu­ni­ties cre­at­ed by the Inter­net, pro­mot­ing changes to both infra­struc­ture and cul­ture need­ed to make open the default for research and edu­ca­tion.”

  • Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources Info From Unesco.org “Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources (OER) are teach­ing, learn­ing and research mate­ri­als in any medi­um – dig­i­tal or oth­er­wise – that reside in the pub­lic domain or have been released under an open license that per­mits no-cost access, use, adap­ta­tion and redis­tri­b­u­tion by oth­ers with no or lim­it­ed restric­tions. OER forms part of ‘Open Solu­tions’, along­side Free and Open Source soft­ware (FOSS), Open Access (OA), Open Data (OD) and crowd­sourc­ing plat­forms.” Unesco Rec­om­men­da­tions on OER:  “The Rec­om­men­da­tion on OER — adopt­ed unan­i­mous­ly by the UNESCO Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence at its 40th ses­sion in Novem­ber 2019 — sup­ports the cre­ation, use and adap­ta­tion of inclu­sive and qual­i­ty OER, and facil­i­tates inter­na­tion­al coop­er­a­tion in this field. “
Finding Open Educational Resources
Creating an Open Educational Resource
  • Press­Books account with BCcam­pus “BCcam­pus Open Edu­ca­tion has cre­at­ed a self-serve instance of Press­books. This is avail­able for instruc­tors and staff from post-sec­ondary insti­tu­tions in British Colum­bia and the Yukon. Please note, when sign­ing up for an account, you must use your insti­tu­tion­al email.”
  • OER Com­mons: Cre­ate with Author Anoth­er author­ing tool ‘Open Author” avail­able through the OER Com­mons. Easy to use edi­tor, acces­si­bil­i­ty fea­tures, “remix­able, curate­able, find­able”.
  • Iowa State OER Starter Kit  “This starter kit has been cre­at­ed to pro­vide instruc­tors with an intro­duc­tion to the use and cre­ation of open edu­ca­tion­al resources (OER). The text is bro­ken into five sec­tions: Get­ting Start­ed, Copy­right, Find­ing OER, Teach­ing with OER, and Cre­at­ing OER. Although some chap­ters con­tain more advanced con­tent, the starter kit is pri­mar­i­ly intend­ed for users who are entire­ly new to Open Edu­ca­tion. [Ver­sion 1.1. Revised Sep­tem­ber 5th, 2019.]
  • Chap­ter “Tools And Tech­niques for Cre­at­ing OER Includes short video (5:17) with tips for con­sid­er­ing an OER (cre­ation and use). Low, medi­um and high tech options are dis­cussed.
  • UBC: Cre­at­ing Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources A UBC focus but some good gen­er­al (and prac­ti­cal) infor­ma­tion on OERs get­ting start­ed on cre­at­ing them.
Student Created Open resources