Open Educational Resources: Training & Tools

Developed to give instructors an introduction to the use and creation of open educational resources (OER), this text contains some more advanced content but is primarily intended for users new to OER.

Includes worksheets to help instructors practice the skills they need to confidently find, use, or even create open educational resources (OER). Instructors, librarians, instructional designers, administrators, and anyone else interested in OER are welcome to explore the OER Starter Kit Workbook.

From EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, this short flyer covers a wide range of topics providing an introduction to OERs.

Covering a wide range of topics concerning OER, everything from the history of OERs to finding, assessing, creating and using OERs.

Developed by OpenStax, this brief lesson contains introductory information and tips for finding and creating OERs and resources that can be used.

This course covers introductory aspects including open licensing and public domain, provides practical guidance on locating and applying OER resources, and techniques for using OER in the classroom.

This course provides an introduction to the laws related to the use of OERs in a course. Includes activities such as finding OER content for use in a class and publishing OER works.

Interactive tool that estimates the influence that the adoption of OER will have on a number of variables for a university.

Developed by Maricopa Community Colleges, this short guide covers the important concept in the world of Creative Commons licenses of the difference between “collective works” and “derivative works.” Distinguishing between these types of use helps you determine how to provide appropriate attribution and licensing information.

NPC document providing basic info on how to create and use EPUBs in OERs.

This brief document was developed at NPC and contains introductory information to Open Education Resources as well as several well regarded sites to begin exploring OERs.

Tutorial for faculty to adopt OER. Maricopa Community College, Open Content to Transform the Classroom by Matthew Bloom.

List of resources for Creative Commons Licensing.

Groups within OER Commons, broken down by type, subject, and grade level.

This group is for all LibreNet consortium members. Main forum is for announcements only (users can't post). Each consortium member has a private subgroup where they can post.

Free webinars to help educators gain the skills necessary to shift to an open practice.

A first round of projects aimed at updating existing open textbooks authored in Pressbooks with infusions of interactive practice activities created with H5P software. The metaphor of “cooking with H5P and Pressbooks” in a kitchen was designed to reinforce the experimental practice, working / deviating from recipes, and the communal attributes of these familiar spaces. This presentation will provide an overview of the project and share examples from the first “spiced up” textbooks now available for use and reuse. What can be better than home cooking?

Libretexts Youtube channel which includes general tutorials, webinars from specific events, and more.

This website is designed to serve as a resource for educators interested in learning more about Open Pedagogy. We invite you to browse through the examples, which include both classroom-tested practices and budding ideas, and to consider contributing examples of your own experiments with open pedagogy.

CCCOER has an extensive archive of webinars about OER. New webinars are held in the spring and fall.

A five-step guide to adapting an open textbook, created by the Open Textbook Network.

This well-designed course by the Austin Community College District consists of 10 modules providing a detailed introduction to OER and can be completed in one sitting.

Includes sessions on OER Design, Authoring, and Remixing, as well as Including Students as Course Creators and Contributors, focusing on the free authoring environment, Open Author. Included are templates for design and authoring, as well as instructions for using the Open Author tool.

The goal of this accessibility toolkit 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.

These handbooks help support the creation of accessible content and include resources for creating accessible web pages, presentations, documents, and more.

The Library Publishing Coalition's Professional Development Committee coordinates a regular webinar series to provide opportunities to share knowledge, discuss on-the-ground experiences, and build on community expertise.

Includes video, matrix of selected platforms, and links mentioned in the video. This session features live demos by expert users or creators of a selection of no-cost (some freemium) platforms and/or collaborative communities, including: VTechWorks, Merlot, Open Textbook Library, OER Commons, VT’s Odyssey learning object repository, Overleaf, Pressbooks, and Rebus Community for Open Textbook Creation. 2 Hours.

From the College Libraries Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, this text details notable examples of the application of OER in higher education.

This is a five-step guide for faculty, and those who support faculty, who want to modify an open textbook. Step-by-step instructions for importing and editing common open textbook file and platform types are included.

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.

The BCcampus Open Education Self-Publishing Guide is a reference for individuals or groups wanting to write and self-publish an open textbook. This guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook.

This practical guide created by BCcampus walks you through how you can customize an open textbook for your course. Read online or download a PDF.

This toolkit provides information and tools to help faculty and library staff across all publicly funded colleges in Ontario to understand, engage with, and sustain OER in their work and practice.

This toolkit is a free-to-access resource that aims to help academic book authors to better understand open access book publishing, and to promote and increase trust in open access books

Developed by Open Commons, Open Author can create and customize open educational resources to meet your needs and the needs of your learners.
You can use Open Author to create resources with both instructor and student facing views. This means that instructors can view the resource that is customized for instruction, and students can view the resource that is customized for their learning needs.

Free, open source application used to create flowcharts and other kinds of charts and diagrams.

The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER).

GitBook is the online platform to create and host books built using the GitBook format. It offers hosting, collaboration features and an easy-to-use editor.

An Open Source office suite comparable to Microsoft Office. Document editing, spreadsheets, charts, presentations, small databases, images/PDFs, a mathematical formula editor, etc.

Open Source application that creates and edits PDF documents.

Free, open source tool for taking screenshots and editing and annotating them.

The longstanding favorite, full-featured, free and open source image editing application. Like Photoshop, the learning curve is steep, so check out the GIMP tutorials. https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

If you are used to Photoshop, this free and open source image editing application is built on the GIMP source code, but behaves like Photoshop.

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.

With Pressbooks, faculty can find, adapt, create, and contribute to educational content that is customizable, accessible, interactive, and, if the author chooses, free. Whether an institution requires a quick solution for the next semester or an educational content creation solution for the long term, Pressbooks can ease the burden of the rapid shift to blended and online learning.

Ubiquity Press is an open access publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and data. We operate a highly cost-efficient model that makes quality open access publishing affordable for everyone.

PubPub is a collaborative writing and publishing platform from MIT's Knowledge Futures group. The basic level for free allows for robust drafting, editing, and publishing features, as well as a URL at pubpub.org and e-mail support.

WeBWorK is an open-source online homework system for math and science courses. Instructors can create problem sets or use material from existing libraries. Current courses include college algebra, discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, single and multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra and complex analysis.

Can be used to create interactive tutorials and mash up text/media.

Easily record and edit videos of action on your computer screen.

Online photo editor and drawing tool. Requires Flash.

Build publication-quality books and documents from computational materials.

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

A free image hosting service (up to one terabyte) that allows you to create galleries and slideshows and mark your content as Creative Commons.

Is the most popular and receives the most traffic, but the learner may get lost among millions and millions of search results.

For K-12. Contains content by and for educators.

Is comparable to YouTube, but a smaller user-base, less clutter from low-quality videos, and no advertisements.

Allows you to upload Word documents, which you can then embed in any blog, web page, or online course. Be mindful that 1. Scribd has shifted its focus to selling a monthly subscription to their ebook collection, and 2. many Scribd users use it to host junk and plagiarized content.

Allows you to upload Powerpoint presentations, which you can then embed in any blog, web page, or online course. You can mark your content as Creative Commons.

Allows you to upload Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint slideshows, which you can then link to - but not embed.

H5P makes it easy to create interactive content by providing a range of content types for various needs. You can create interactive content by adding the H5P plugin to your WordPress, Moodle or Drupal site, or integrate it via LTI with Canvas, Brightspace, Blackboard and many other VLEs that supports LTI integration.

Hypothesis is a powerful web annotation tool that many users deploy to enable collaboration between authors and editors, personal note taking and annotation, engagement with readers, or use as a teaching tool with students.

OPEN Washington, an Open Educational Resources (OER) network.

A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT™) is a document that explains how information and communication technology (ICT) products such as software, hardware, electronic content, and support documentation meet (conform to) the Revised 508 Standards for IT accessibility. VPATs™ help Federal agency contracting officials and government buyers to assess ICT for accessibility when doing market research and evaluating proposals.

Includes 80 online resources that you can use to learn how to build or participate in a collaborative educational effort that focuses on publication and development of those materials. Although some choices focus solely on publication, development, or tools used to accomplish either effort, some provide multifaceted venues that offer communities in which to collaborate on one or all of these efforts.

Create a lesson by adding questions, discussion topics, and other supplementary materials to TED Talks or any educational video on YouTube.