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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.

Authoring Tools

Consider Your Publishing Tool

Before you begin authoring your OER content, it is important to consider the publishing tool you'll use to disseminate your work.  A few things to keep in mind when making that decision:

  1. What technology platforms am I already comfortable using? Do I want to learn to use a new tool as I author my OER?
  2. What technology platforms are my audience most comfortable using? Will authoring or publishing in a particular platform require them to learn a new tool?
  3. If someone wants to reuse or adapt my content, will it be simple for them to do that with the format(s) I've made available? 
  4. Do I have budget to pay for access to a tool or for advanced features in an otherwise free tool?

There is a multitude of authoring tools and the following is just a sampling.  

Pressbooks

Pressbooks is a WordPress-based, open-source online publishing platform that allows authors to create, format, and publish books in various formats, including webbooks, ebooks (EPUB), and print-ready PDFs.  It is a popular publishing solution and the University of Virginia supports an institutional license.  

Navigate to our Pressbooks page, view our UVA publications, or Reach out to us at: lib-oer@virginia.edu to learn more.

Documents and Presentations

  • Inkscape: This open source application creates and edits PDF files. Includes a vector drawing and graphics tool and is a great option if your document is image-heavy.

  • LibreOffice: An open office suite of tools (ala Microsoft Office) that includes word processing, PDF editor, spreadsheets, presentations, small database, images, and more.

  • Open Author (from OER Commons): An editing, cloning, and publishing interface all in one that allows for the creation of courses, units, lessons, activities, and presentations. Note that it is not currently capable to produce portable formats like ebooks and PDF files.

  • Microsoft Office can also be used to create non-proprietary document formats. 

Images

  • GIMP is a full-featured and open source image editing application with somewhat of a learning curve.

  • Greenshot is a free, open source tool for taking, editing, and annotating screenshots.

  • Adobe Photoshop, which can be purchased with an educational license from the UVA Bookstore, allows you to create image files in a number of open source image formats,

  • InkScape is an open source application that creates and edits PDFs and also is a vector drawing and graphics tool. A better option for PDF editing if your document is image-heavy.

  • Dia is a free, open source application used to create flowcharts and other kinds of charts and diagrams.

Audio & Video

Creating good audio files will require an external microphone as opposed to the one that came with your desktop or laptop. UVA users can utilize the equipment available at the Robertson Media Center on the third floor of Clemons Library. 

Audio Editing

  • Audacity is an open source audio editing software. Audacity comes with a learning curve.  If you are unfamiliar with it, you may benefit from accessing these tutorials. There is ongoing controversy about data security and privacy in Audacity...we're investigating.

  • GarageBand is a line of digital audio workstations for macOS and iOS that allows users to create music or podcasts. 

Video Production

  • Screencast-o-matic records and allows for editing of videos of your computer screen.

  • Softchalk can be used to create interactive tutorials and mashup text/video.

  • iMovie and Moviemaker, for Mac and Windows respectively, can be used to edit video and output it to open source formats.