When planning to use an open textbook or other OER in your course, it is important to plan ahead and ask yourself the following questions:
After asking these questions, you can decide whether to adopt, adapt, or create a new OER for use in your course.
Adopt, Adapt, or Create?
There are various options available to faculty interested in including OER in their courses. These options are listed below:
AdoptIf there are high quality, vetted Open Educational Resources available on the topic your course covers, and you do not feel the need to edit or otherwise alter them for use in your course, you might consider adopting them for use "as is." Adopting is the simplest way or including OER in your course, and the least time intensive.
Adapt/BuildIf there are OER available on the topic your course covers, but they are dated, too broad, or contain information which is beyond the scope of your course, you may want to consider adapting the materials. After checking that the Creative Commons license attached to the materials allows for adaptation, you may choose to edit the materials to tailor them to your course.
Alternately, if there are OER available on the topic your course covers, but no single resource is broad enough to cover the needs of your course, you may want to consider building a "course pack," a selection of various OER, free online materials, and websites which make up the resources for use in a course. These packs can be extremely versatile and adaptable resources.
CreateIf there are no high quality OER available on your topic or if you have course materials which you believe are superior to the OER available to you online, you may want to consider creating or licensing your own course materials. Creating Open Educational Resources can be as simple as openly licensing and sharing a syllabus you currently use or sharing lesson plans on OER repositories like OER Commons.
Other OER creation processes, such as publishing open textbooks, can be more complex. For more information, visit our
BC3 now has a subscription to the Pressbooks platform for creating OER texts. Use it to adopt textbooks created by others into your course or create your own. Pressbooks allows the inclusion of media and interactive elements using applications like H5P, and Pressbooks integrates with the Blackboard system including the Blackboard gradebook.
H5P
"H5P enables existing CMSs and LMSs to create richer content. With H5P, authors may create and edit interactive videos, presentations, games, advertisements and more. Content may be imported and exported. All that is needed to view or edit H5P content is a web browser. "
Canva
Canva's simple drag-and-drop platform includes images, photos, icons, shapes and fonts to easily create infographics and presentations to enhance course content.
The Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER) has created a five-step process for adopting OER.
Contents:
The Faculty OER Toolkit is an information resource about and 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.
By Abbey Elder..
"This starter kit has been created to provide instructors with an introduction to the use and creation of open educational resources (OER). The text is broken into five sections: Getting Started, Copyright, Finding OER, Teaching with OER, and Creating OER. Although some chapters contain more advanced content, the starter kit is primarily intended for users who are entirely new to Open Education. [Version 1.1. Revised September 5, 2019.]
This book provides a five-step guide for faculty who want to modify an open textbook.
The goal of the Accessibility Toolkit is to provide resources to create a truly open textbook -- one that is free and accessible for all students. It is the result of a collaboration between BCcampus, Camosun College and CAPER-BC.