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Open Educational Resources (OER) at UVA

A guide to educational material that are freely available to use, adapt, share, and reuse.

Guides & Workflows

Considerations

Before you get started with the creation of OER, there are a few things to consider:

  • Collaborate!  Reach out to the OER librarians to help connect you with collaborators both within and outside the library.
  • Authoring new content is great; however, the benefit of openly licensed material is the ability to revise existing content.  Before you author, do a search to see if there is an existing OER that you might modify.  For assistance in doing this, review How to Find OER.
  • Be realistic with your timeline.  Developing, revising, and remixing OER content takes time.  Consider your capacity and set some 'deliverable' dates for you/your team to hold yourself accountable.
  • Note the copyright terms of the images and videos you will need before starting your project. 
  • Create your OER in a document format that doesn't require proprietary software to edit.

Guides for Authoring OER

  • The OER Starter Kit - written by Abby Elder, an excellent introduction to OER, particularly useful to those new to the field, covering: Getting Started, Copyright, Finding OER, Teaching with OER, and Creating OER.  It includes the useful planning document, the “OER Project Roadmap Worksheet.”

  • VIVA Open! Advancing Open Educational Practice Workshop Series - Includes sessions on OER Design, Authoring, and Remixing, as well as Including Students as Course Creators and Contributors, focusing on the free authoring environment, Open Author.  Included are templates for design and authoring, as well as instructions for using the Open Author tool.  VIVA hosts an Open Educational Practitioners community to facilitate the exchange of resources, ideas and information by OER practitioners.  Open Author can be launched from this group site. 

  • BC Campus Self Publishing Guide - Serves as a reference for individuals or groups wanting to write and self-publish an open textbook.  It provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook.  Copyright, open-copyright licenses, and the differences between citation and attribution are discussed as well as the importance of copy editing and proofreading.  Checklists and templates are also provided. 

  • Authoring Open Textbooks by the Open Textbook Network - Content includes a checklist for getting started, publishing program case studies, textbook organization and elements, writing resources and an overview of useful tools.

  • Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students - A handbook for faculty interested in practicing open pedagogy by involving students in the making of open textbooks, ancillary materials or other OER.

  • WikiEducation - Information on teaching and learning with Wikipedia.

  • BC Campus Open Education Accessibility Toolkit - The goal of this accessibility toolkit is to provide resources for each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open textbook--one that is free and accessible for all students. 

  • Creating and Modifying Open Educational Resources - Step-by-step guide to creating and modifying content.  Created by Affordable Learning Georgia.

  • Marketing Open and Affordable Courses - This collaboratively authored guide helps institutions navigate the uncharted waters of tagging course material as open educational resources (OER) or under a low-cost threshold by summarizing relevant state legislation, providing tips for working with stakeholders, and analyzing technological and process considerations. The first half of the book provides high-level analysis of the technology, legislation, and cultural change needed to operationalize course markings. The second half features various case studies.  

Copyright and Licensing

If you haven't done so already, please review the detailed information for Creative Commons Licensing.