LibGuides: Affordable Course Materials and Open Educational Resources (OER) for Faculty: Adapt/ Remix OER

OER Adoption Tools and Resources

Below are some resources for adapting, creating, and sharing your own OER:

*note: this was reused and adapted from Kirkwood Community College Library's guide on open textbooks

Modifying an Open Textbook Details 6 basic steps to modifying and hosting an existing open textbook or other OER.
OpenStax CNX: Localization and OER "In the context of OER, localization refers to the process of taking educational resources developed for one context and adapting them for other contexts. These contexts can, for example, be geographical, pedagogical, political, or technical. The practice of localization encompasses more than the translation of materials into a local language or swapping a photo to reflect a culture. Localization is at the heart of the OER process—it exemplifies diversity, openness, and reusability."

Open Textbook Adoption Worksheet

Open Textbook Adoption Worksheet (Community College Consortium) Created by Dr. Judy Baker, Director of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, this resource simplifies the process of finding and adopting an open textbook.

If you have found OER to adapt or remix, you should first check to see if there are any built-in authoring tools available from the repository where you found the OER. Below are tutorials of authoring tools in various OER repositories.

OER Common Open Author
If the OER were 1) originally composed by Open Author in OER Common, and 2) have been given use licenses that allow for their editing and remixing, you may use the "remix this resource" option to copy and edit an Open Author resource.
OpenStax CNX: Create a module
See also how to create adaptations of existing OpenStax CNX content.

Below are some possible free tools you could use to create/adapt OER:

Free tools to create/adapt OER
Documents	Images	Audio	Video	eBook publishing
OpenOffice Google Doc	Pixlr Be Funky PicMonkey (source: Wikipedia)	Audacity	iMovie Windows Movie Maker YouTube Video Editor	iBooks Author AcademicPub Lulu

Also, see a list of free and/or open source OER Authoring Tools that you can use to create, adapt or remix OER of different types, curated by the Empire State College's library.

OER Authoring Tools guide, created by Sarah Morehouse is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

University of Oklahoma Libraries markdown Converter
The University of Oklahoma Libraries announces the release of an open-source Markdown Converter designed to help make open content, including open educational resources (OER), shareable to the fullest extent possible. By using the Markdown Converter, well-structured documents can be converted into PDF, HTML, EPUB, and DOCX file formats with an easy-to-use web interface instead of the command line.
Markdown is a markup language that simplifies authoring for the web. Its syntax is both easy-to-read and easy-to-write using tools that come installed on all computers.
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The Markdown Converter is available for anyone to use on the OU Libraries website at https://tools.libraries.ou.edu/markdown. The source code, openly licensed under an open source software license, for the converter can be obtained via GitHub. The Markdown Converter can be viewed ‘in action’ performing an upload and conversion process.

Sharing Existing Learning Objects

You probably have already created potential OER and just haven't thought about them as resources you might be able to share! OER take the shape of different resources, including (but not limited to):

Syllabi and courses created (for example, if you created a class on WWI Literature, it might be useful for others to see your assigned readings and activities)
Videos/ tutorials on a specific topic
Worksheets
Group activities
Writing prompts
Tests, quizzes, and other assessments
Lesson plans
Research assignments and activities

If you'd like to share one of your learning objects as an OER, think about the following:

Decide where they might go (general or disciplinary repository)
Find out what the requirements are for them to go there. Do they need to be in a specific format? What metadata entry is required?
Rank/ evaluate your OER. What level is it intended for? What’s the language use (very technical or introductory)? Can you add instructions/ tips on how you used it?
Craft metadata for the object. What terms can you use to make your OER more discoverable?
Licensing! Look at the CC website to decide what’s right for you. What are your intentions for the object?
If you are remixing several OER which were published under different licences, use the Creative Commons License Compatibility Wizards to help you determine whether there will be compatibility issues.
Refer to CC attribution guide and write apporpriate citations for resources you used. The suggested citation format is: [Title] by [Author], used under [CC BY Licence]

Permissions Guide For Educators

This guide is intended to support curriculum developers--including educators, curriculum experts, librarians, and others--in determining the legal ways that they can use digital resources created by others in their own lessons and collections.

The guide also serves as a primer on how to seek permission to use resources that are currently under copyright. It includes considerations around whether to ask for permission, as well as resources to aid in conversations and negotiations with rights holders.

OER Commons