Found OER that you would like to modify for your course? Need to create your own OER? Click each of the links on the left to explore resources to help you adapt, customize, and create OER to best fit your needs.
Learn how to customize — or adapt — an open textbook so that it better fits your needs in the classroom and elsewhere. The resources below are available to support you:
Adaptation Guide: Created by BCcampus, this guide defines the term adaptation and discusses reasons for customizing an open textbook, why this is possible with an open textbook, and the challenges involved.
Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know: Created by the Open Textbook Network, this five-step guide for faculty and those who support faculty includes step-by-step instructions for importing and editing common open textbook file and platform types.
You might be interested in creating your own OER if the content you need doesn’t already exist. OER you create can take the form of lesson plans, syllabi, videos, websites, guides, textbooks, and more. The resources below are available to support you:
:The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) is a living repository of collective knowledge, written to equip all those who want to publish open textbooks with the resources they need. Representing two years of collaboration, innumerable conversations and exchanges, and a wide range of collective knowledge and experience, the Guide is a book-in-progress and will evolve and grow over time.
Production of Open Educational Resources: Developed by the University of Hawai’i at Manao Outreach College, this workflow diagram identifies the major steps in OER production.
Open Education Self Publishing Guide: Developed by BCcampus, this guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook.
Authoring Open Textbooks: Created by the Open Textbook Network, this guide includes a checklist to get started, publication of program case studies, textbook organization and elements, writing resources, and an overview of useful tools.
A license is a document that specifies what can and cannot be done with a work (whether sound, text, image or multimedia). It grants permissions and states restrictions. Broadly speaking, an open license is one that grants permission to access, re-use, and redistribute a work with few or no restrictions. Open licensing is a key part of OER. The resources below are available to help you to determine what license to use for your materials:
Creative Commons (CC) Licensing: Free, easy-to-use copyright licenses that provide a simple, standardized way to give permission to share and use creative work.
Creative Commons license chooser tool: Generates the appropriate CC license based on your preferences.
Open Attribution Builder: Created by Open Washington, this tool helps users of Creative Commons licensed materials automatically generate attributions.
The M.O.S.T. initiative advocates for the creation of fully accessible learning resources. Being fully accessible requires designing learning materials that can be navigated and understood by all users, including those who have visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities (adapted from the National Federation of the Blind and the Rouse and Souza definitions of accessibility). Check out these resources that can help ensure your learning materials meet the definition of fully accessible:
Protocol for Curating Accessible OER: Developed by CAST, the purpose of the Protocol for Curating Accessible OER is to provide detailed yet easily implemented techniques for evaluating the accessibility of web-based OER for learners with disabilities. The protocol can be implemented by any educator who curates materials that will be shared with students and families to support learning. The protocol is organized into four areas based on the core principles of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international accessibility standard: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Each principle has its own section of the protocol, which begins with its importance for OER accessibility. Step-by-step instructions with screenshots then show you how to apply related practices as you evaluate OER for accessibility.
The Accessibility Switchboard: Developed by the National Federation of the Blind to connect higher education, government, business, and consumer audiences to existing, freely available resources to support the development of accessible information and communications technologies.
Accessibility Toolkit 2nd Edition: Created by BCcampus, Camosun College, and CAPER-BC, the toolkit provides resources for each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create open and accessible course materials.
UDL on Campus: Accessibility and Open Education Resources: A resource created by CAST that provides examples, key factors and resources about accessibility of OER.
OER and Accessibility: A library of resources on accessible technology created by California State University, MERLOT, Open CourseWare Consortium, and the National Federation of the Blind.
Because they can be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed, OER enable continuous quality improvement of instructional materials through ongoing assessment and iterative redesign in ways that copyrighted textbooks cannot. The M.O.S.T. initiative is dedicated to supporting faculty in designing high-quality OER and using data to continuously improve it. The resources below provide some guidance on the processes of evaluating OER for quality:
Open Education Resources: Article by Quality Matters with recommended sites for openly licensed instructional materials and guidance on reviewing OER quality.
Rating the Quality of Open Textbooks:How Reviewer and Text Characteristics Predict Ratings: A study published in the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning that explores questions about rating the quality of open textbooks.
