7 Expectations and Guidelines
This section will go more in-depth regarding best practices for adding OER to the spreadsheet for faculty to review and basic OER searching.
Title Field
Please make sure to Update the “title” field for each new spreadsheet you create. This title should reflect the Course Number (if available) and a short description when possible. For example:
- MGT 2080 – Employment Law – Round 1
- HLTH 1350/1355/1360 – Yoga Teacher Training
- Medical Terminology – Videos
OER Searching “order”
Use the Resource Origin/Aggregate Legend at the top of the spreadsheet as a guide. This varies depending on what type of resource the requester would like. Sometimes they only want textbooks, other times only videos or interactive OER. In general though, This list is the order in which we approach first-round OER searching.
Textbook Resources
| Open Textbook Library | https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ | All textbooks in the OTL are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. The library currently includes 717 textbooks, with more being added all the time. |
| OpenStax | https://openstax.org/ | OpenStax is based at Rice University in Houston, TX. This is a great textbook site. There is overlap in content with similar OER options in OpenStax CNX. |
| OpenStax CNX | https://cnx.org/browse | The content in OpenStax CNX comes in two formats: Pages, which are like small "knowledge chunks," and Books, which are groups of Pages. Our open license allows for free use and reuse of their content. This is community-created content and there is often overlap between different OER on the same topics within OpenStax CNX and OpenStax. |
| BCcampus | https://open.bccampus.ca/ | Based out of Canada, BCcampus allows you to search for quality open textbooks. There are notes in their database if an OER has been reviewed. |
| LibreTexts | https://libretexts.org/ | The LibreText Project is a leading, non-commercial open textbook organization initiated at the University of California, Davis. |
A Note on Saylor: Saylor has great textbooks and online courses. However, other search options like Merlot and OER Commons are more user-friendly and will return Saylor results on the topics your search. For now, please ignore the Saylor hyperlink in the spreadsheet.
Aggregators/Referatories
| OASIS | https://oasis.geneseo.edu/ | Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records. This is a curated OER search. |
| George Mason OER Metafinder | https://mom.gmu.edu | The OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button. Because it is a real-time, federated search, it can take a bit longer than searches of pre-indexed, curated con