Open Educational Resources (OER) at UVA

Considerations

Publish with tools that produce non-proprietary formats that are easy to:

• navigate,
• access on different devices,
• meet accessibility standards for users of assistive technology, 
• and are accessible off-line (i.e., in portable formats) to allow for access across the digital divide.

While PDFs have previously been viewed as ideal outputs for OER content, accessibility considerations make them more challenging for users of assistive technology. Other alternatives include open source word processing applications, .odt format (the open version of .doc/.docx), or an HTML web page. 

Publishing Platforms

• Pressbooks
  Open source software, it is an editing, cloning, and publishing interface all in one. Allows for easy creation of portable formats like typeset PDF files (i.e., structured to improve the reading experience) and ebooks. Local hosting of most themes is available with its free version; proprietary hosting, themes, and tech support are available for a fee.

• Libretexts
  Online platform for creation and dissemination of OER

• OER Commons Open Author
  Create resources with both instructor and student-facing views; host them in OER Commons. 

• Jupyter Book
  Build publication-quality books and documents from computational materials

Make Your Work Discoverable

• Upload it to Libra, UVA's institutional repository.  It will automatically become findable through VIRGO.

• Add it to the Open Textbook Library.

• Register it with OER Commons.

• Register it with VIVA Open.

• Add it to MERLOT.

OER Communities

• Rebus Community
  An online platform for collaborative authoring and reviewing open textbooks. Another editing, cloning, and publishing interface all in one.