Research Guides: Textbook Affordability and Open Educational Resources (OER): Adopting, Adapting, and Authoring OER

The Three As

When it comes to using OER, there are three As that refer to your options:

Adopt: Take an existing OER and use it as-is (with no or minimal edits or alterations).

Adapt: Make some edits to an existing OER to tailor it to your course, or combine multiple OER into one!

Author: Create your own OER, with all brand-new content.

CCC's Textbook Affordability librarian is available to support you in any OER project!

Resources for Getting Started

CCC's Textbook Affordability Librarian
CCC's Textbook Affordability Librarian, Justine Munds, is available to help you with any OER project- from start to finish! Get in touch with Justine to get started!
Open Oregon OER FAQ
This FAQ was built collaboratively by librarians all over the state gathering questions that they frequently hear about OER. Some of the major categories are: How to find OER, How to use OER, How to create OER, Basic information about OER, and how to find help.
If you have any questions about this FAQ or other OER questions, ask a librarian at reference@clackamas.edu.
The OER Starter Kit
Author Abbey Elder, from Iowa State University has shared her book "The OER Starter Kit": "This starter kit has been created to provide instructors with an introduction to the use and creation of open educational resources (OER). The text is broken into five sections: Getting Started, Copyright, Finding OER, Teaching with OER, and Creating OER. Although some chapters contain more advanced content, the starter kit is primarily intended for users who are entirely new to Open Education.”
As an added bonus it is an OER itself and uses Pressbooks, one of the most common publishing tools so you can get a feel for how a book you create might look. Highly recommended!
CCCOER - Getting Started with OER
CCCOER is a consortium of community and technical colleges committed to expanding access to education and increasing student success through adoption of open educational policy, practices, and resources.

Adapting for inclusivity and accessibility

Accessibility Toolkit - 2nd Edition
The goal of the Accessibility Toolkit - 2nd Edition 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. This is a collaboration between BCcampus, Camosun College, and CAPER-BC.
Activity: Adapting Resources for Inclusion
This worksheet walks you through a few ways you can make the OER in your course more inclusive for your students.
Assessing Visual Materials for Diversity & Inclusivity
This resource is a modification of the Washington Models for the Evaluation of Bias Content in Instructional Materials (2009) that is made available through OER Commons under a public domain license. This resource attempts to both update the content with more contemporary vocabulary and also to narrow the scope to evaluating still images as they are found online. It was developed as a secondary project while working on a BranchED OER grant during summer 2020. It includes an attached rubric adapted from the Washington Model (2009).
The OER Starter Kit Workbook: Accessibility and Usability
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
-Provide three examples of ways an OER can be checked for accessibility.
-Explain how Universal Design for Learning is a good practice for both pedagogy and accessibility.
Trans inclusion in OER
This resource is a guide on how to make OER more inclusive and representative of trans and gender diverse people. It is intended to be easily incorporated into a scholarly communications course, while also being valuable to faculty and others interested in learning about the topic and how to make changes to their own course materials.
Indigenous Open Educational Resources: Respectfully Uplifting Community Voices Webinar
Open education is grounded in Western understandings of ownership, protocol, and accessibility. Often open education has a goal of making all knowledges available for all peoples. Within Canadian copyright law is tension with Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous ways of knowing and being. The open education community must carefully consider Indigenous knowledges and self-determination, which are deeply rooted in community-defined ethics and protocols and do not fit into ordinary academic contexts. This session will explore some of the concerns around open educational resources (OER) and Indigenous knowledges while using Indigenous worldviews to better understand how Indigenous knowledges can be respectfully incorporated into OER.

Authoring OER

Authoring a brand new OER is only necessary sometimes. Some things to consider when deciding if you should author an OER:

Do you really need to author an OER? Can you adopt or adapt instead?
You don't need to work alone! Create a team of colleagues to collaborate.
You'll need to plan for editing and peer-review before using your OER in the classroom

Resources:

Authoring Open Textbooks
This guide is for faculty authors, librarians, project managers and others who are involved in the production of open textbooks in higher education and K-12. Content includes a checklist for getting started, publishing program case studies, textbook organization and elements, writing resources and an overview of useful tools.
Creative Commons License Chooser
Unsure how which license you want, or simply want help with how to format the license, this License Chooser is for you!
Guidelines for Using Generative AI Tools in Open Educational Resources
This set of guidelines was developed by Affordable Learning Georgie and is intended for faculty and staff creating new OER.