Guides: Open Educational Resources: Introduction

What's In This Guide

This guide is a quick start to finding, evaluating, adopting, adapting, and creating open educational resources.

OER Basics
What are Open Educational Resources? Why should you use them? Are they as effective as commercial textbooks? Find the answers in our overview of OER basics.
Find OER for Your Courses
The first step towards using OER in your courses is knowing where to look for them. We've put together a list of OER collections that you can search for high quality resources for your courses.
Evaluate OER
Will the OER you've found meet your needs? Use our list of criteria, and links to external rubrics, to evaluate OERs for quality, alignment with course objectives, and ease of use.
Adopt OER in a Course
Once you've found an OER to use in your course, follow our step-by-step process to share the resource with your students, track usage, and evaluate impact.
Adapt an OER
One of the advantages of OER is that you can freely modify a resource to meet the needs of your students. We walk you through this process, including determining licensing needs, getting credit for your work, and sharing your revised resource.
Create Your Own OER
Join the OER community by creating your own OER--or make resources you've already created openly available. Our guide to creating OERs provides a step-by-step outline of this process and links to other helpful resources.

Above images are from the Noun Project. "Information" by Rflor, "Search" by Three Six Five, "Feedback" by Adnen Kadri, "Selected" by amante de icono, "Revise" by Takao Umehara, and "New Document" by Viktor Ostrovsky are licensed under CC BY 3.0.

OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit

This toolkit is a free-to-access resource that aims to help academic book authors to better understand open access book publishing, and to promote and increase trust in open access books. This toolkit may also be of use to stakeholders including publishers, universities, research funders and research institutions. You will be able to find relevant articles on open access book publishing following the research lifecycle, by browsing frequently asked questions or by searching with keywords.

The OAPEN open access books toolkit offers a coherent set of more than 30 individual articles addressing various topics related to open access books such as:

What is open access?
Common misconceptions about open access
Copyright and licensing
Funding
Quality assurance
Publishing options
Discoverability & impact

The OER Starter Kit

Author: Abbey Elder

Book Description: 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.]