12 Publishing and sharing your OER
Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
- Discover where you can host and share your OER
- Understand the importance of metadata in OER discoverability
- Learn how to promote and measure the impact and reach of your OER
Hosting your OER
Your OER project will need a home or “host,” which is somewhere you can store your OER project files. Others can access, reuse, and remix your OER from this home. How and where OER projects reside and are delivered for use once they are completed is a decision that needs to be considered sooner rather than later (Cuillier et al. 2016). It will impact what you are able/willing to host (and how).
OER hosting mechanisms can be divided into three categories:
- Repository: a centralised site that stores the OER locally (e.g., an institutional repository)
- Referatory: a portal or directory that links to the OER and provides the metadata to help locate these resources (e.g., Open Textbook Library)
- A combination of a repository and referatory (Brahmin, Khribi, and Jemni 2018; McGreal 2017)
These are explained further below.
Repositories
Institutional repositories
Institutional repositories (IRs) are quite common at academic institutions and are used for hosting locally produced materials, usually research articles, theses, books etc. created by the academic and student authors at the institution. Often, these IRs are managed by the university library.
An IR can offer some advantages for OER hosting. One is that it’s often possible to customise metadata (the information that describes your OER). Another advantage is more access points (e.g., your content is findable by title, author, content type, etc.). However, an IR also needs care and maintenance, although that will not necessarily fall on you. You should check with your institution’s library to see if you can use the IR to host your content. This can get tricky if you have many different types of media in your OER, but most IRs can handle the better-known formats.
Hosted solutions
There are some institutions that use third-party shared storage services (e.g., Google Drive, Box, and GitHub) to host their content. For other media formats, such as videos and slides, Kaltura, YouTube, Slideshare, or similar platforms can be used.
These hosting solutions have the advantage of being open, and many universities have a shared storage solution already in place. However, these solutions may not allow for search engine optimisation (SEO), metadata, and search engine functionality, such as being able to search by author or title, unless specifically created.
Referatories (portals and directories)
If you do not have the technical support to host the content in-house, there are other ways to host the content elsewhere. There are a few repositories that will host your content and/or act as your content creation system. These platforms and repository combinations include:
- LibreTexts – an online OER platform
- OER Comm