4 How to Go Open
A Framework for OER
See “A Framework for Creating OER” (2020) by Ariana Santiago is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International license.
- Research: explore OER in your subject area, learn about OER and copyright, consult a librarian if needed.
- Pre-production: define your OER goals and curate existing OER. If available, call for colleague volunteers to help remix, adapt and create.
- Design: develop the OER outline, scope the production and assess needs.
- Development: write and revise content, get peer review/feedback, check intellectual property and accessibility. Import to your publication platform and perform a final quality assurance check.
- Publication: disseminate and share with appropriate channels and distribute to students.
Finding OER
First, when looking for relevant OER for your course, please consult with your college OER champions (available in the ‘Read Me’ tab). They will help guide you through this process and find available options that will likely fit your needs. Note, that if your course is in general education that many well-developed and widely adopted resources already exist (e.g., OpenStax and Open Textbook Library). Alternatively, if your course is a career and technical education course, then open textbooks may already be developed for your subject area (e.g., Skills Commons Repository, Libretexts Workforce Library) or these could be lacking. Yet, know that open content is expanding daily, and thus if you are unable to find relevant open content today, that this may be developed and available soon.
For more information, consult The OER Starter Kit Workbook sections ‘Finding Open Content’, ‘Repositories and Search Tools’, and ‘Ancillary Content’. Also see the Community College Consortium for OER’s ‘Find OER’ guidance with helpful resources.
Adopting OER
Finding and adopting resources can be time-consuming and overwhelming, but we are fortunate to have so many individuals in the open education world that are standing by and ready to support you in your endeavor. In the below steps, these individual roles are bolded. We recommend, starting small and creating an action plan.
Step 1: Review the Materials
The process for reviewing open textbooks is the same as commercial textbooks. Keep in mind that many open textbooks have been peer-reviewed by faculty or subject matter experts so you may use these reviews to narrow down choices before examining them yourself. If you want to evaluate the materials yourself, there are some existing rubrics that can guide you.
- Open textbook review criteria from BCcampus Open Textbooks
- Evaluation rubric for OER from Achieve
- Evaluating OER module and resources from SUNY
- OER rubric from WTCS’s OpenRN project
- ‘Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Openness’ blog series from CCCOER that raises many points you will also want to keep in mind when evaluating OER.
Step 2: Modify the OER (if necessary)
After completing an evaluation of the materials, you can determine whether any mo