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 ... OER Content, OER Pedagogy / Practices, and OER 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

About Recorded Sessions

Browse recorded sessions about what are OERs, hear faculty stories about their experiences creating OER textbooks for their courses, connect OERs with RPT (DoERRS), learn how to use Pressbooks to create your own OERs, and explore Open Pedagogy and using OERs in your teaching

Contact Information

Contact Donna Ziegenfuss for more information about using OERs in your teaching or creating OERs.

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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.

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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 respositories 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 Universial Design for Learning to improve and optimize learning for ALL students: (UDL) guidelines

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Other Resources

For Exploring the Topics Around OERs and Open Pedagogy

• An OER book that provides a directory to OERs by Discipline (more details coming here soon!). 
• An open Canvas tutorial course to help you explore OERs and Pressbooks.
• Open Canvas Page that contains a previous OER and teaching presentation and links to additional resources.
• Information on evaluating OERs:
  • Open Textbook Library Review Criteria.
  • MERLOT Peer Evaluation Form.
  • North Carolina's Digital Learning Initiative Rubrics.
  • Achieve OER Rubric Criteria.

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