Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources
Overview
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are materials and resources offered free and open for anyone to use, and under some licenses, to re-mix, improve, and redistribute. OERs include textbooks, courses, course material, learning modules, learning objects, collections and journals.
Helpful Links:
- Brand new AACU study about OERs: Making the Case for Open Educational Resources (2023)
- Leveraging Open Educational Resources to Advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: A Guide for Campus Change Agents (Report).
- 7 things you should know about ... Open Education Content, Open Education Practices, and Open Education Policies (short two-pager overviews from Educause)
- Creative Commons Licensing (CC) for providing attribution of works, sharing of works, and reusing of works.
- You can add a CC license to your own work, like you see on other OER works, using the Attribution Builder from Open Washington
Contact Information
Contact Donna Ziegenfuss for more information about using OERs in your teaching or creating OERs.
Pressbook Access
As a University of Utah faculty, you have free access to Pressbooks, a tool to create your own OER books that can be a stand alone book, or integrated with Canvas (each chapter in your book becomes a Canvas module)
- Want to use Pressbooks for creating your own open textbook? You can login and get access to software using your Utah UNID and password to access the software interface and create your own OER.
- Reach out to Donna Ziegenfuss for assistance with Pressbooks.
Additional Resources
Some Additional Resources to Get You Started in Finding, Evaluating and Using OERs in Your Teaching
- Repositories of OERS and open textbooks will help you find resources on your course topics. Some repositories contain books but you can also find assignments, syllabi, lectures, etc.:
- All types of resources: OER Commons, Merlot, Oasis, Mason OER Finder.
- Books: Pressbooks, Directory of Open Books (DOAB), Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota), Openstax, Rebus Press, BC Open Collection.
- Open Pedagogy / Open Practice: Open Pedagogy Approaches Book, Open Pedagogy Notebook with examples and sharing, Attributes of Open Pedagogy.
- CAST Universal Design for Learning to improve and optimize learning for ALL students: (UDL) guidelines.
Exploring Topics Around OERs and Open Pedagogy
- An OER book that provides a directory to OERs by Discipline (more details coming here soon!).
- Information on evaluating OERs:
- Open Textbook Library Review Criteria
- MERLOT Peer Evaluation Form
- North Carolina's Digital Learning Initiative Rubrics
- Achieve OER Rubric Criteria