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 Education Matters: Why is it important to share Content? (or embedded below) From UBC: Short (3:32) video on what OER is and an example of an open course being shared, adopted, modified, translated and used around the world. 

  • 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