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.

Its purpose is to provide readers with a quick and user-friendly introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) and some of the key issues to think about when exploring how to use OER most effectively. The second section is a more comprehensive analysis of these issues, presented in the form of a traditional research paper. For those who have a deeper interest in OER, this section will assist with making the case for OER more substantively. The third section is a set of appendices, containing more detailed information about specific areas of relevance to OER. These are aimed at people who are looking for substantive information regarding a specific area of interest. Originally published 2011; Revised 2015.

This video was made possible by a grant from Achieving the Dream. Through this grant Bay College will create degree pathways using Open Educational Resources. Open Educational Resources are resources licensed with a Creative Commons license type.

What’s all the BUZZ ABOUT Creative Commons, is an introduction and overview of the origins and uses of Creative Commons Licensing and Open Education Resources. This presentation thematically is centered around photographic and audio works of Bees resourced from the Commons.

The comparative choice of Bees is intended to liken the role which Creative Commons serves in today's contemporary legal and digital online ecosystems to the role which Bees serve in the natural world as pollinators.

This PPT Presentation presents
Introduction to Creative Commons
The Legal Foundations of Creative Commons Licensing
Identifying & Defining CC Licenses
Defining, Creating and Sharing OER-Open Educational Resources

Description provided by COERLL:

COERLL hosted an online “OER hangout” on September 25th on the subject of creating open educational resources (OER) with students. With 26 people attending, five language instructors shared their experiences of working with their students to create openly licensed resources for teaching and learning:

Amber Hoye and Kelly Arispe lead the Boise State University Department of World Languages’ Pathways OER Language Teaching Repository of openly licensed proficiency based activities, created by students and teachers.

Kathryn Murphy-Judy, Ngoc-My Guidarelli, and Laura Middlebrooks are part of a team of faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University who have developed an open, connected platform for students to share authentic resources.

At Boise State, upper-level undergraduate students, with the mentorship of staff and faculty, create activities to be used in the weekly language lab component of introductory language courses. These activities can also be used in the classroom and K-12 teachers in Idaho have been involved in creating and teaching with them. At Virginia Commonwealth University, undergraduate students in the 202 class, who are either majors on their way to upper level courses or students finishing their language requirement, curate authentic resources and discuss them with native speakers. Then, upper level students turn those curations into instructional modules, which are being integrated into online open textbooks.

You can learn more about the logistics of these projects by viewing the webinar video, reading about the projects, and perusing the materials. Here, we’ll mention a few of the important themes that came up during the discussion.

One important element of students being involved in materials creation is that they understand what other students will be interested in and can choose topics and texts they know their peers will enjoy. Involving students ensures that a more diverse array of voices and perspectives are represented in the materials, and gives students more of a choice in their own education. Students also gain skills beyond language and culture when they work on these projects: digital citizenship, open license knowledge, technical skills, an understanding of language proficiency, and knowledge of state and national standards.

Each of these projects has a broad community of people with various skills who can support each other and contribute in different ways. At Boise State, the language resource center director, language students and students from other departments, faculty mentors, SLA & CALL researchers, K-12 teachers, state partners, and librarians have all contributed to the OER. At VCU, students, faculty, and librarians contribute to the materials and partnerships are developing with K-12 teachers who use the materials in their courses.

Each of these projects follows an iterative process of development. The work doesn’t start and finish in the span of a semester, it grows and changes. Students develop materials, native speakers proofread them, teachers teach with them, and the team refines them. The Pathways Project carries a disclaimer that “The activities on the Pathways Project OER Repository were created by upper-division students at Boise State University and serve as a foundation that our community of practice can build upon and refine. While they are polished, we welcome and encourage collaboration from language instructors to help modify grammar, syntax, and content where needed.” The cycle of the projects is such that lower-level students can get involved in the project as learners, but go on to take a more active role in the project as they progress.

The panelists recommend to anyone interested in creating OER with their students that they start small, and reach out to available communities (institution-wide, or online professional networks) for support and sharing. On that note, COERLL’s next OER hangout is on the topic of joining a teacher community. Join us on November 13th!

View the webinar video, links to the repositories, slides from the presenters, and more on the event page of COERLL’s website.

This is both a human communication and public speaking text for the general education course.

This book covers original research on the implementation of open educational practices through the use of open educational resources at the university level. The emphasis on open education in this book is on contextualising resources, supporting student agency and fostering self-directed learning specifically within a South African milieu. The envisaged chapters cover conceptual and review research and empirical work focussing on open educational practices and the use of renewable assessments. The work starts off with an overview of an institutional-wide open education project that prompted the research followed by research on open education in terms of various modules in the health science, music education, law, philosophy, dietetics, anthropology, French language learning, journalism and political science. There is a clear gap in the literature on open education in terms of open educational practices, specifically in terms of contextualising resources, supporting student agency and fostering self-directed learning in a South African context. Despite the existence of some general works on open education in terms of policy, social justice and open textbooks, this book will be unique in exploring the intersections of openness, specifically with contextualisation, student agency and self-directedness.

CurvedLand is an applet for showing what the world would look like with different geometry. It is named CurvedLand in tribute to the science fiction novel, Flatland, by Edwin Abbott, which describes the adventures of a two-dimensional being who is visited by a stranger from the third dimension.

One of the central ideas of Einstein's theory of relativity is that space and time curve in response to the matter and energy within them. A curved space is one that doesn't obey the usual laws of Euclidean geometry: the angles of a triangle don't generally add up to 180 degrees, the circumference of a circle isn't pi times the diameter, parallel lines can either converge towards each other or move apart, and so on.

Since the geometry we observe is very close to Euclidean, however, it is hard for most of us to picture what this difference would mean physically. If you draw a circle and a diameter, how could the ratio be anything other than pi? To answer this question, imagine that as you move around in space the shapes of objects appear to distort. This is what happens in curved space. If you draw a circle around yourself and then start walking around it to pace out the circumference, it will look to you like you are walking along a constantly changing ellipse.

CurvedLand illustrates this distortion as it would appear in a two-dimensional curved space. The structure is similar to a mapping program. You can place objects of different shapes in different places in the world and then move around the space to see what they look like from different perspectives.

The focus of many open education projects is to provide access to education. But what does access mean? If the materials are not accessible for each and every student, do they fulfill the mandate to deliver fully open education? The open education movement has helped people in different parts of the world access content that they would otherwise not be able to view or interact with. Open education resources reduce costs for students and allow for greater flexibility for instructors. Accessibility can help push the movement even further forward.

The goal of the OER Accessibility Toolkit is to provide the needed resources needed to each content creator, instructor, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open and accessible educational resource — one that is accessible for all students.

The Faculty OER Toolkit is an information resource about and guide to adapting and adopting Open Educational Resources. Included are definitions and examples, information about Creative Commons licensing, and tips on how to adapt and/or adopt OER for classroom use. School Counsellors can benefit from understanding OER.

The Enoch Pratt Free Public Library is based in Baltimore, Maryland. This site explain resources and links to assist patrons with accessing Movies and Film in the Public Domain.

In 2018, the Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE) and the Alabama Community College System (ACCS) launched an OER grant program to help lower the cost of higher education. This experimental study, which involved over 18,000 students and generated a cost savings of over $2,000,000, raised awareness among faculty and staff of the many advantages of using OER. Subsequently, in response to multiple requests for Creative Commons (CC) training, the partners launched a second grant program with the intention to train-the-trainer, whereby multiple institutions statewide would have a resident expert on OER and CC licensing. As a result of the two large grant programs and some smaller programs funded by ACHE, the state has fostered numerous OER champions who have launched some innovative initiatives on their campuses. During this session, attendees will learn about the successes and challenges that ACHE and ACCS experienced when launching the programs, and they will receive detailed information about some of the activities going on at two of Alabama’s public institutions, the University of Montevallo and the University of North Alabama.

Fundamentals of Business, Second Edition (2018) is an 372-page open education resource intended to serve as a no-cost, faculty customizable primary text for one-semester undergraduate introductory business courses. It covers the following topics in business: Teamwork; economics; ethics; entrepreneurship; business ownership, management, and leadership; organizational structures and operations management; human resources and motivating employees; managing in labor union contexts; marketing and pricing strategy; hospitality and tourism, accounting and finance, and personal finances. The textbook was designed for use in Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business introductory level business course, MGT1104 Foundations of Business and is shared under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial ShareAlike 4.0 license.

2018 version formats include: PDF, Accessible "screen reader friendly" PDF, ePub, Mobi, XML/Pressbooks (editable), and open document format.
The Pressbooks online version (HTML) is available at: https://doi.org/10.21061/fundamentals-of-business
The 2016 version of this book includes editable MSWord files.

If you are an instructor reviewing, adopting, or adapting this textbook, please help us understand your use by filling out this form http://bit.ly/business-interest

Instructor resource sharing portal: https://www.oercommons.org/groups/fundamentals-of-business-user-group/1379

#GoOpen Launch Packet: Phase 1

#GoOpen Districts that choose to implement openly licensed educational resources when existing resources are due for renewal start by putting together a team of people at the district level to review and evaluate the resources and what is needed. The team decides which content areas and grade levels might be appropriate candidates for replacement by openly licensed educational resources. The team then decides whether to curate existing resources, create new ones, or implement a combination of the two. It also decides how they will organize and incorporate the new resources into the district’s digital learning infrastructures.

#GoOpen Launch Packet, Phase 2: In selecting and organizing an implementation team, #GoOpen Districts identify key stakeholders from across the district to play important roles in creating, curating, and leading the transition to openly licensed educational resources. Once selected, the #GoOpen team works together to determine the appropriate roles and responsibilities for each member of the team and to organize its work.

#GoOpen Launch Packet, Phase 3: #GoOpen Districts that implement openly licensed educational resources at scale need a robust and comprehensive infrastructure for learning that supports high-speed access to resources and devices for both students and teachers in school and at home. In determining their district’s digital readiness, #GoOpen teams take infrastructure into consideration in the early stages of planning to ensure that the infrastructure is reliable and secure, and that every student has equitable access to the resources.

This Launch Packet is designed for districts that have decided to implement a systematic approach to incorporating openly licensed educational resources into their curriculum by becoming a #GoOpen District. This is Phase 4 of the systematic approach.

If you have found yourself searching for, adapting or creating materials for your heritage classes because of a lack of readily available commercial resources, this site is for you!

Brief video describing the benefits that using OER can have for educators. OER empowers teachers to make decisions about the best curriculum for their specific needs, save money and empower students as educational content creators.

Folder of openly licensed course materials for Human Nutrition course, including in-depth introduction to the science of nutrition, stressing characteristics of nutrients and their food sources. Examines digestion, absorption and metabolism of nutrients. Includes individualized diet analysis and current-interest topics including weight management and some disease therapies. Emphasis is placed on use of scientific research criteria for evaluation of current nutrition articles.