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Identifying OER
Creative Commons
The Creative Commons site explains more about OER, and accompanying licenses. Click on the link to Use and Remix to learn more about finding, and adopting OER.
OER Mythbusting
This publication from SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) sheds light on common myths related to OER.
Copyright and Fair Use Permissions Guide For Educators
This guide provides a primer on copyright and use permissions. It is intended to support teachers, librarians, curriculum experts and others in identifying the terms of use for digital resources, so that the resources may be appropriately (and legally) used as part of lessons and instruction.
Copyright and Fair Use
This robust site from Stanford University includes detailed cases as well as examples of fair use and policies. Of note are the copyright charts and tools that can help you evaluate copyright status and promote best practices.
Copyright and Fair Use Animation from Common Sense
This short video provides tips for students (and faculty) on how to recognize and cite copyright works.
Other Open Licensing
GNU Licensing
This site focuses on GNU licensing – which is specific to open software.
Guide to Open Licensing
This guide highlights the definitions of open licenses, along with why and how you can use them. Scroll down for additional resources to other open licensing sites.
Open Licenses
This resource from Project Open Data shares more insight on the range of open licenses, with specific examples of each type.
Finding OER
SUNY OER Services
The starting point for finding ready-to-adopt OER courses that can be implemented in your LMS. Consultations and resources for those wishing to explore beyond the ready-to-adopt catalog are available, as well.
OER Commons
OER Commons provides a robust search capability across a variety of openly licensed content types, and a variety of disciplines.
The Open Professionals Education Network: Find OER
This list includes a wide variety of OER Search tools with a short description of each. As this page is an openly licensed resource with a CC-BY license, you should recognize this list itself as an OER! Feel free to copy, add, remix, and share!
The Community College Consortium for OER: Find OER
This site connects you to a wide selection of search repositories, including general, subject-specific, open textbooks, books, open courseware, open journals, and digital media.
Open Educational Resources (OER): Find OER
This list of OER Websites and search tips from the University of Illinois includes repositories of recorded lectures, videos, open textbooks, modular components, complete courses, and other OER search engines.
Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
This utility, from George Mason University Libraries, searches across 16 OER repositories at once. You can add or remove sources to modify your search targets.
Evaluating OER
Achieve Rubrics
These series of eight rubrics were designed to help states, districts, teachers, and other users determine the degree of alignment of Open Educational Resources (OER) to college- and career-ready standards and to determine other aspects of quality of OER.
OER Assessment Rubric
This rubric is developed by Sarah Morehouse with help from Mark McBride, Kathleen Stone, and Beth Burns is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
OER Evaluation Criteria
From Affordable Learning Georgia a six component checklist for evaluating OER.
Rubric for Quality of Technology Interactivity
This rubric from Pasadena City College is a remix of the Achieve Rubric set. It simplifies evaluation of the quality of technical interactivity of an OER. You can find other adapted rubrics on the Shatford Library site. https://libguides.pasadena.edu/c.php?g=497843&p=3409404
Accessibility
Accessibility Toolkit
BC Campus Open Education has created an in-depth guide and toolkit to help you assess the accessibility of OER. Although the Toolkit was designed to guide OER creators to create open and accessible textbooks, you can use the guide to learn more about OER accessibility, and to evaluate the OER you are considering adopting for your course(s). There is also a handy checklist at the end of the Toolkit for you to use (and remix!) for your own purposes.
W3C Accessibility Standards
This site, from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), shares the formal standards for designing and developing accessible web content. The initiatives behind this site aim to provide access for all, including those with disabilities.
WebAim: WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
The WebAim site has extensive resources on screen readability and accessibility. This specific page enables you to enter a URL to check on the accessibility of a web-based resource.
OER Adoption and Delivery
Open Attribution Builder
The Open Attribution Builder is a web tool to assist users of CC material to properly attribute. It allows you to enter the Title, URL for work, Author and website, Organization, and CC license type and will provide attribution information which can be copied and pasted into your own work containing the CC material. Here is an example of using the tool to provide its own attribution.
Compelling Reasons to Adopt Open Educational Resources
This two page document shares compelling reasons to adopt OER — specifically for administrators, including information on marketing, quality, productivity, and institutional reputation.
The OER Adoption Impact Calculator
The OER Adoption Impact Calculator helps you understand many of the potential impacts of adopting OER instead of traditionally copyrighted learning materials. You can adjust the settings to match OER initiatives at your institution, and the impact charts will update in real time as you make those adjustments.
Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.