Open Educational Resources (OER)

Implementing OER or affordable materials in your course may be as simple as finding an OER textbook or library-licensed e-book that fits your teaching needs and then sharing the link with your students.

However, after reviewing the available resources, you may find that you are more interested in adapting an OER textbook or set of learning materials. Perhaps an OER textbook contains valuable teaching material, but you would like to condense, update, or localize it. Or, you have found useful material from several different OERs and would like to combine these into one course pack for your students.

It is possible to modify and adapt OERs in the way that best suits your teaching needs! To ensure that you can make modifications, check the Creative Commons license of the OER you are considering adapting.

If you find that there are no existing OER that fit your teaching needs, you may be interested in creating your own OER. In fact, you may already have teaching materials — lesson plans, lecture notes, videos, or assignments — that can be openly licensed and shared widely as OER.

A more intensive project, such as creating an OER textbook, will be time-consuming and require significant work. However, the time invested in creating an OER can pay off by resulting in a resource that you can use and update in the years to come. Creating an OER requires planning and support from colleagues and campus resources. See below on how the Salmon Library and the Enhanced Teaching and Learning Center (ETLC) can help.

When creating OER, make sure that your materials are inclusive of all learners and accessible to students with disabilities. See this Inclusive Teaching open resource for guidance on how to integrate culturally responsive teaching into your learning materials. Affordable Learning Georgia's Accessibility Series and Rubrics provide guidelines and an evaluative rubric for making learning materials accessible. 

Why share my OER?

• Boost your professional profile by making your teaching practices visible at a national and international level.
• Make a meaningful contribution to teaching in your field by enabling educators at other institutions to use your materials.
• Retain ownership of your intellectual property by assigning a Creative Commons license to your teaching materials.
• Document your impact by tracking the usage statistics of your OER, including views and downloads.

How can I share my OER?

When you are ready to share your OER, contact the Library to discuss depositing it in our institutional repository, LOUIS. LOUIS collects, manages, and provides access to UAH research and scholarship, and we have a collection dedicated to OER. Sharing in LOUIS will help to increase the discoverability of your OER on search engines and to track usage statistics. To get started, email louis@uah.edu.

Before sharing in LOUIS, you may also want to contact the ETLC for assistance with instructional design, formatting, and Creative Commons Licensing.

Additionally, there are many online repositories for OER. Librarian April Urban can talk to you about options for sharing your OER beyond LOUIS.

Adapting or creating OER involves multiple steps and is best accomplished by leveraging on-campus resources! The Salmon Library and the ETLC can provide support for accomplishing your OER goals.

The Salmon Library can assist with:

• Finding OER, understanding your options for adaptation and/or creation, and navigating Creative Commons licenses. Contact April Urban (april.urban@uah.edu) with any of your OER-related questions.
• Sharing your OER in LOUIS. Email louis@uah.edu for more information.

The ETLC can assist with:

• Understanding Creative Commons licenses.
• Best practices for instructional design.
• Improving the graphic design and professional presentation of your OER, whether that means combining multiple existing resources into a single resource or creating a new resource from scratch.
• Integrating your OER into Canvas.
• Email helpdesk@uah.edu for more information.