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Open Educational Resources (OER): Adapt/ Remix OER

This guide provides an introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER), including how to find, evaluate, use, and adapt OER materials.

OER Adoption Tools and Resources

Make sure to make your OER accessible to your potential audiences. There are many different ways to go about this, including offering different formats and using clear organization. Check out the BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit as a guide during this process. Look into this as early as possible during the creation or adaptation of OER because the changes are easy to implement at the beginning, but become more difficult as the project moves forward. 

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

Open Textbook Adoption Worksheet

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.

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 and online content
OpenOffice
Google Doc		 Pixlr
Be Funky
PicMonkey
(source: Wikipedia)		 Audacity iMovie
Windows Movie Maker
YouTube Video Editor

iBooks Author
AcademicPub
Lulu
Omeka.net
WordPress*

 

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.

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:

  1. Decide where they might go (general or disciplinary repository)
  2. Find out what the requirements are for them to go there. Do they need to be in a specific format? What metadata is required?
  3. 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?
  4. Craft metadata for the object. What terms can you use to make your OER more discoverable?
  5. Licensing! Look at the CC website to decide what’s right for you. What are your intentions for the object?
  6. If you are remixing several OER which were published under different licences, use the Creative Commons License Compatibility Chart to help you determine whether there will be compatibility issues.
  7. 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]

About this LibGuide

Creative Commons License
Based on the LibGuide Open Educational Resources (OER): Adapt/ Remix OER at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

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