Adopting, adapting, or creating OER can be an overwhelming experience. Here are a few tips and hints to get you started.
Step 1: Schedule Time
Give yourself time to explore the open educational resources that are currently available. Researching and evaluating OER requires time, patience, and persistence. There are so many OER available, so ask your librarian for guidance and direction when you first begin the process. Manage your expectations and progress.
Step 2: Know Copyright
Understand and become familiar with copyright laws and creative commons licenses. Your librarian can help with what each license means and show you tools to help combine different types of licenses.
Step 3: Search for OER
Ask your librarian about large OER repositories as a starting point.
Step 4: Evaluate and Test OER
Compare and assess OER content to identify the highest quality materials relevant to your needs. Use something small in your course to see if it works for your needs before making a larger commitment to the resource.
Step 5:Adapt/Adopt
Know what you need. Look for an existing textbook to adopt or remix before creating your own. Look to see what ancillary materials are out there before making decisions on what to create or use.
There are numerous places to look for an open textbook. These are three of the most popular due to the quality of the content. If you cannot find a textbook in your area, please contact your OER librarian.
These databases contain high quality images for general purposes and subjects. There are many more focused databases that may be better for certain disciplines. Those will be listed under each subject area. Please check each image carefully to make sure it is freely available to use.
The following require you to narrow to open licenses. On each web page, look for a menu that lets you narrow and focus.