Research guides: Open Education Resources: Find, Assess, Adopt, Adapt, Create OER

Get Started

Step 1: Find and Assess OER

Fill current content gaps.
Identify and assess resources you would like to enhance or replace for a course.
Look for suitable resources using links provided in this guide.
Work with your Subject Matter Librarian and/or an Instructional Designer in the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning to find suitable resources.
Consider assigning a Creative Commons attribution license to your own materials such as lecture notes or PowerPoint slides, and then make available online.

Step 2: Adopt or Adapt OER

Use an OER 'as is', print or download OER, or share direct links with your students.
Adapt OER to your own needs, add local context, or pick and choose which parts you will use.
Partner with a colleague to edit or adapt an OER resource, for example, sharing case studies, test banks, or H5P activities.
Gather feedback from your students or colleagues on what content should stay, go, or be adapted.
Make minor amendments, remix or add components, or rework a resource.

Step 3: Create and Share your own OER

Start piecing together the resources you have found to create a single learning resource, or collection of resources.
Use OER authoring tools (links available within this guide) to support you.
Make your new resources available for others to find or adapt, and then to begin the life cycle again.
Add descriptors to your resources to increase findability, and select and assign the appropriate license for any new/adapted resources.
Contact a librarian to learn how to best share or describe your resources.

Attribution: Derived from the OER Handbook for Educators, by WikiEducator, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Find OER

BCcampus Open Textbook Search
Search the BCcampus open collection
The Open Library from eCampus Ontario
Open Textbook curated by eCampus Ontario
Pressbooks Directory
This directory provides an index of 2301 Open books published across 94 Pressbooks networks.
OER Commons
An international, extensive OER library that brings together a variety of OER across learning levels and subjects. Includes an embedded authoring tool for remixing and localizing content. Explore the Hubs for resources curated by specific groups, for example, the National Science Digital Library.
Open Education Network Open Textbook Library
A world-wide collection of openly licensed textbooks hosted by the OEN in the Center for Open Education at the University of Minnesota
Open Washington: Finding OER
Open Washington offers a free, open, online course on How to use Open Educational Resources. This is the sixth module in this course.
Merlot Open Education Repositories
The MERLOT system provides access to curated free and open online teaching and learning support materials and content creation tools, used by an international community of educators, learners and researcher.
OpenStax Textbook Library
Provides open textbooks that are peer-reviewed by educators, and can be reused and remixed to align with general course requirements.
LibreTexts
A collaborative project which fosters an open access textbook environment. Find texts on subjects such as biology, mathematics, physics, engineering, humanities and more.
Learnful: a Free and Open Ecosystem for Canadian Educators
A Community of Inquiry and Practice for authoring, discovering, and sharing Open Education Resources (OER).
Humanities Commons
Humanities Commons is open access, open source, and nonprofit. It is focused on providing a space to discuss, share, and store cutting-edge research and innovative pedagogy—not on generating profits from users’ intellectual and personal data.
Virtual Lab and Science Resource Directory
Free science resources designed to support remote science education. This directory is updated as new resources are identified. Note that, while all resources in this directory are free, not all are open. Resources that carry Creative Commons or otherwise open licenses are clearly labelled.
Skills Commons
SkillsCommons is a free and open online library containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. The Open Educational Resources (OER) are produced by community colleges across the nation and can be found, reused, revised, retained, redistributed and remixed by individuals, institutions, and industry.
SOL*R
Repository service to free online learning resources provided by BCcampus to facilitate sharing, discovery, reuse, and remixing of a growing collection of content created by BC post-secondary educators from a wide variety of disciplines and subject areas. Resources include open textbooks, individual learning activities and tools, and full programs.
ABOER Repository
An OER collection from Alberta
Lyryx Learning
Free open textbooks combined with affordable high quality online homework in the areas of Calculus, Linear Algebra, Business Math, Financial Accounting (Intro and Intermediate), and Micro and Macroeconomics.
TAP Open Access Textbook Database
Locate and search open textbook databases via this aggregated search created by the Textbook Affordability Project.
Cornell Open
A global open access portal for both new and classic out-of-print titles from the catalog of Cornell University Press. Offers open access to key titles in the fields of anthropology, classics, political science, literary criticism and theory, German studies, and Slavic studies.
The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
Simultaneously searches across 21 different sources of open educational materials.
List of OER Repositories
Includes everything from H5P activity catalogue, to collections of lesson plans, projects, and course outlines in various subjects.
Oasis OER Search
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier by searching open content from 97 different sources and contains over 385,000 records.
The NOBA Project
Ready made textbooks that can be used as-is or customized to fit your needs.
Open Syllabus Explorer
Open Syllabus is a non-profit research organization that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support novel teaching and learning applications. Open Syllabus currently has a corpus of nine million English-language syllabi from 140 countries. Open Syllabus helps instructors develop classes, libraries manage collections, and presses develop books.
Colorado’s Top 40: OER Curation Guides
Specific course materials curated from a variety of sources by librarians and vetted for content and alignment by subject matter experts. Very useful for those developing or adopting OER course content.

Assess OER

Librarians can help you find and evaluate open education materials for use in your classes. You may want to evaluate resources according to the below criteria:

Accuracy
Relevance
Production Quality
Accessibility
Interactivity
Licensing

Review the BCcampus Faculty guide for Evaluating OER (opens a PDF in a new tab or window)

Course Quality Review Guidelines
Some more guidance from BCcampus.
Texas Learn: Finding and Evaluating OER
Texas Learn OER is a free, online, self-paced course introducing OER, Open Licensing, Finding and Evaluating OER, OER Accessibility, etc.
Guide to Curating OER
Information to help find, evaluate, adapt and share open educational resources to meet learning outcomes and objectives. From eCampus Ontario.
BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit
Provides resources to support content creators, instructional designers, educators, and librarians in creating open and accessible textbooks.
OER Accessibility Checklist
OER Evaluation Rubrics
ISKME's Open Educational Practice Rubric
Defines a set of open educational practices that help educators to advance a culture of open education, and to advocate for the potential benefits of open educational resources (OER) in the context of continuous improvement. Intended to guide educator practice in working with OER to ensure that every student has the opportunity to engage in learning effectively. The rubric supports educators in accessing, curating, evaluating, and adapting OER in response to students’ particular needs, interests, and contexts, to author and share original or remixed resources, and to disseminate approaches to the implementation of those resources for future OER users to benefit from.
Rubrics for Evaluating Open Education Resource (OER) Objects
A comprehensive evaluation tool from Achieve. It is comprised of eight well-defined rubrics, each with a robust rating system for assessing OER.

Adopt/Adapt OER

BCcampus Open Textbook Adoption Finder
The Adoption Finder provides actual adoptions used for specific courses at BC post-secondary institutions and lists potential adoptions for comparable courses. Therefore, most of the hours used to create this finder were spent adding codes for courses to which the adopting course transferred (transferable courses). This was done using the BC Transfer Guide.
BCcampus Faculty OER Toolkit
An excellent guide to adapting and adopting Open Educational Resources. Included are definitions and examples, information about Creative Commons licensing, and tips on how to adapt and/or adopt OER for classroom use.
BCcampus Adaptation Guide
A reference to adapting or revising an open textbook. Defines the term adaptation and discusses reasons for revising a book, why this is possible with an open textbook, and the challenges involved.
BCcampus Print-on-Demand Guide
A reference for setting up an open textbook print-on-demand service.
6 Steps to Modifying an Open Textbook
Steps to consider before modifying or adapting an existing textbook.
Open Licensing Checklist
From OERCommons, complete this checklist to make sure the resource you are looking to adopt or adapt is openly licensed.

Create OER

OER Creation & Adaptation Guide
A workshop guide walking you through some of the basic steps for adapting existing OER and creating your own
Create a PressBooks Account at BCcampus
Create your own open textbook, or adapt another created by BC or Yukon faculty and instructors. Pressbooks is an online publishing platform that is built on the popular WordPress publishing and blogging platform.
BCcampus Pressbooks Guide
This Pressbooks Guide builds on information provided in the Pressbooks User Guide published by Pressbooks.com. It follows the steps an author might take to create or modify an open educational resource (OER) in Pressbooks. Each chapter points readers to the pertinent chapters in the Pressbooks User Guide, provides any additional information, and includes instructions specific to post-secondary faculty and staff working in British Columbia and the Yukon.
BCcampus Self-Publishing Guide
The BCcampus Open Education Self-Publishing Guide is a reference for individuals or groups wanting to write and self-publish an open textbook. This guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook.

OER Design Tips

Begin with existing open content - Look to existing collections with quality resources such as BCcampus' open textbook library. Consider materials you have already created that could be assigned a Creative Commons license and then made available online.
Make content accessible - Note that it is more work to make existing OER accessible than it is to create an accessible OER from the start. Look to the accessibility information in this guide.
Make content adaptable - The more modular content is, the easier it is for future users to reuse it. When working on an open textbook, separate content by chapter and subchapter. If possible, provide a version of your resource in an editable format, such as .docx or Google Docs if you would like to make it easy to adapt.
Make content open - Select the Creative Commons license that best suits your liking, and clearly display the CC license. If you integrate other materials into your resource, select those that are open.
Make content discoverable - Determine the best platform for sharing your resources. Contact a librarian to provide advice on adding descriptors that make your OER discoverable.
Invite feedback - Evaluate your resource using the rubrics provided in this guide. Ask peers to review the resource using a common evaluation rubric. OER development is iterative, you will likely want to revisit your OER regularly.

More information:

Quality Assurance Guidelines for OER: TIPS Framework, Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia
Creating and Modifying Open Educational Resources, Affordable Learning Georgia

Image attribution: design by Eucalyp from the Noun Project

Accessibility

A key advantage to using open textbooks is that they are inherently accessible for students. BCcampus, Camosun College, and CAPER-BC created an Accessibility Toolkit for open education. Included are resources that authors, instructional designers, educational technologists, librarians, administrators, and teaching assistants require to create truly open and accessible textbooks.

BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit

Provides resources to support content creators, instructional designers, educators, and librarians in creating open and accessible textbooks.

Accessible textbooks should include an accessibility statement. While not required, these statements can be important and useful additions to resources.

An accessibility statement acts as a resource for those who have questions about the accessibility features of a resource. It should provide an overview of accessibility features and contact information in case there are any problems (BCcampus).

Chapter 11 of BCcampus' Accessibility Toolkit focuses on accessibility statements.

Complex images for All Learners
A great overview of how to make your complex images (charts, graphs, tables, etc.) accessible online.