LibGuides: Open Education Resources: Find, Adopt, Create, Adapt, &amp; Assess OER

BCcampus Open Textbook Search
Search the BCcampus open collection
The Pressbooks Directory
This directory provides an index of 2301 books published across 94 Pressbooks networks.
List of OER Repositories
Includes everything from H5P activity catalogue, to collections of lesson plans, projects, and course outlines in various subjects.
The Open Library from eCampus Ontario
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.
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.
Open Stax
Peer reviewed and openly licensed textbook database hosted by Rice University.
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.
OpenStax Textbook Library
Provides open textbooks that are peer-reviewed by educators, and can be reused and remixed to align with general course requirements.
The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
Simultaneously searches across 21 different sources of open educational materials.
The NOBA Project
Ready made textbooks that can be used as-is or customized to fit your needs.
TAP Open Access Textbook Database
Locate and search open textbook databases via this aggregated search created by the Textbook Affordability Project.
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.
Open Syllabus Explorer
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.
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Open Syllabus is a non-profit research organization that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support novel teaching and learning applications.
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.
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Humanities Commons launched in December 2016 as a pilot project of the office of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association. Its development was made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the pilot was designed to explore whether four partner societies — the MLA; the Association for Jewish Studies; the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; and the College Art Association — could benefit from shared infrastructure for member-to-member communication, collaboration, and public engagement. Since that pilot, additional organizations have joined the network, including the Association of University Presses and the Society of Architectural Historians.
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.

OER Creation & Adaptation
Workshop Guide
Create a PressBooks Account
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.
Pressbooks Training Resources Includes: Pressbooks Support in B.C. Post-Secondaries: A Conversation – May 27, 2021 (BCOEL) ; Pressbooks and publishing resources mentioned during conversation: BCcampus’ Pressbooks Guide ; BCcampus’ Pressbooks tutorial video Series ; Open UBC’s open textbook publishing guide Open UBC’s Pressbook template for faculty to import front and back matter ; Pressbooks Training webinar records and slides (BCcampus)
PressBooks Guide
PressBooks Video Tutorial Series
Created to assist faculty and staff to use, create, and adapt open textbooks with Pressbooks. For more information about any of these topics, see the Pressbooks Guide.
Pressbooks FAQ
Open Textbook Publishing Guide The UBC Library has created an Open Textbook Publishing Guide to help authors navigate the process of creating a textbook. If you are in the middle of creating your own open textbook or are about to embark upon one, this guide will walk you through what the project entails.
UBC Library Pressbooks Template Import this book into your Pressbook to get templates for commonly used front and back matter pages such as Licensing Info, How to Use This Book, Acknowledgements, Glossary, and Versioning History. This book can also be used as an outline, demonstrating an effective way of structuring your Pressbook.
BCcampus Self- Publishing Guide
A reference for writing and self-publishing an open textbook
Live Binders Not designed uniquely for OER curation, but LiveBinders allows users to create a central hub of digital resources on a topic, organized by a system of tabs. Peer and user feedback can be added to each binder through sharing and commenting features.
UBC OER Sprint Toolkit The concept of a sprint is probably most associated with software design and is becoming increasingly used as a strategy or approach for developing open education resources (OER). The sprint approach can be used in a variety of contexts where a group of people (often cross-disciplinary) comes together to focus on a specific project. In higher education, sprints are emerging as a way to accomplish a shared goal while working across disciplines and on a short timeline. Hackathons can follow a similar process but often have a competitive element. Includes everything you need to know about organizing a sprint.

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

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.
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.
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.
Open Author Module Builder
Module Builder is a tool that allows authors to create both student and instructor facing content views. Authors are encouraged to include overviews, pedagogical supporting text, and instructions for both students and other users of the resource.
MERLOT Content Builder
MERLOT’s Content Builder provides templates for creating tailored websites with a variety of designs, including e-portfolio structures, lesson plans, online courses, and others.

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 Faculty guide for Evaluating OER

Course Quality Review Guidelines
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.
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
BC Open Textbook Rubric
Rubric from BCcampus that contains a checklist to evaluate open textbooks.
OER Evaluation Tool
A comprehensive evaluation tool based on the Achieve OER Evaluation Tool. It is comprised of eight well-defined rubrics, each with a robust rating system for assessing OER.

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.

Common OER Myths compiled by Douglas College