When planning to use an open textbook or other OER in your course, it is important to plan ahead and ask yourself the following questions:
After asking these questions, you can decide whether to adopt, adapt, or create a new OER for use in your course.
If there are high quality, vetted Open Educational Resources available on the topic your course covers, and you do not feel the need to edit or otherwise alter them for use in your course, you might consider adopting them for use "as is." Adopting is the simplest way or including OER in your course, and the least time intensive.
Use the Adoption Guide to assist you adopting an OER textbook.
Step 1: Find existing OER materials
Look to see if someone published an OER for your course. If not, look for OERs that you can remix or combine into a new OER. Use the course learning objectives to help focus your search and choose OERs.
Quick Places for OER Textbooks
Step 2: Review and Evaluate
After you found an OER, use evaluation methods and rubrics to assess the quality, content, and curricular alignment.
Possible OER rubrics
Step 3: Curriculum Approval
When you have adopted or adapted an OER it should go through an evaluation process before use by students.
Sometimes you will find OER that might need to be adapted to fit specific needs and requirements for your classroom. Adapting OER means making changes to already existing open content (Revise and Remix). It can be as basic as editing the content so as to customize it to your needs (Revise) or finding other OER content that you can combine and integrate with the original OER content (Remix).
Step 1: Find existing OER materials
Look to see if someone published an OER for your course. If not, look for OERs that you can remix or combine into a new OER. Use the course learning objectives to help focus your search and choose OERs.
Quick Places for OER Textbooks
Step 2: Determine Adaption needs
After you found an OER, think about what you need to modify? Charts, Illustrations, etc. And how much of the OER needs to change to meet course needs?
Possible OER editing tools
Step 3: Make adaptions to the OER
In this step, you will need to 1. check the OER's Creative Commons license to see if modifications are allowed 2. Organize your OER to align with learning objectives and 3. Determine format and Access to the OER.
Use Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know to assist in making adaptions to an OER.
Step 4: Curriculum Approval
When you have adopted or adapted an OER it should go through an evaluation process before use by students.
If there are no high quality OER available on your topic or if you have course materials which you believe are superior to the OER available to you online, you may want to consider creating or licensing your own course materials. Creating Open Educational Resources can be as simple as openly licensing and sharing a syllabus you currently use or sharing lesson plans on OER repositories like OER Commons or MERLOT.
Possible OER tools for building
See Creating OER in The OER Starter Kit for guidance on creating or licensing an OER.
Terms of use:
The OER libguide by PGCC Library is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. It is attributed to UMGC, Butler County Community College, D'Arcy Hutchings and the original versions can be found at UMGC, BCCC, and Hutchings.