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.

Faculty who are new to OER may experience difficulty finding an open textbook or other openly licensed materials to adopt for their courses. Searching on your own is time consuming and the choices can be overwhelming. We will hear from a college librarian who helps faculty find and adopt high quality OER to match their course outcomes and the creators of the award winning OER Commons, a freely accessible online library that allows teachers and others to search and discover open educational resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials.

This module includes information to help find, evaluate, adapt and share open educational resources to meet learning outcomes and objectives. The module also offers information on how to describe and organize OER to enable its discovery by future users.

If you haven’t discovered already, there are myriad open resources that exist. Often the trouble lies in locating those that fit precisely what you need. We’ve broken down these resources with the intent of making the search process more efficient and effective. For each you’ll find a list of unique traits, licensing information, and an example of how to attribute the source. Click one of the media sources in the Find Resources sub-menu for the details.

Brief video describing where and how to find Open Educational Resources, including specific repositories and licences to look for.

This rubric defines a set of open educational practices that help educators to advance a classroom and school culture of open education and to advocate for the potential benefits of open educational resources (OER) in the context of continuous improvement. The rubric is intended to guide educator practice in working with OER to ensure that every student has the opportunity to engage in learning effectively. The rubric supports educators in accessing, curating, evaluating, and adapting OER in response to students’ particular needs, interests, and contexts, to author and share original or remixed resources, and to disseminate approaches to the implementation of those resources for future OER users to benefit from.

We intend this book to act as a guide writ large for would-be champions of OER, that anyone—called to action by the example set by our chapter authors—might serve as guides themselves. The following chapters tap into the deep experience of practitioners who represent a meaningful cross section of higher education institutions in North America. It is our hope that the examples and discussions presented by our authors will facilitate connections among practitioners, foster the development of best practices for OER adoption and creation, and more importantly, lay a foundation for novel, educational excellence.

OER Passport is a professional development program that takes educators through the process of understanding, finding, developing and sharing Open Educational Resources.
This course trains teachers and students on OER use, reuse, licensing, creation, and sharing by completing the following tasks. The first three tasks lay a solid foundation and provide teachers with the tools to complete the last three tasks which focus on the use, reuse, production, and innovative teaching practices.
Participants can complete the tasks online. There are also files to print/create physical copies of OER Passports that can be used in an offline environment.

The OER Toolkit aims to improve equitable access to open learning resources and services to college students by providing a province-wide academic support platform for faculty to use while designing courses and assignments. The Toolkit is a one-stop guide to open educational resources, providing faculty and library staff with tools and information to understand, engage with, create, and sustain OER in their work and practice.

The Toolkit is designed to be used by anyone involved with OER at an academic institution, whether you are part of a team that is collaborating to create OER, a library staff member who is supporting OER development and use, an advocate for OER at your institution, or an instructor seeking to incorporate OER and open pedagogy in the classroom. The primary purpose of this Toolkit is to support faculty and library staff at Ontario colleges; however, it is openly available for use beyond the Ontario college community.

This book is a practical guide to adapting or creating open textbooks using the Pressbooks platform. It is continually evolving as new information, practices and processes are developed. The primary audience for this book is community members at Ryerson University, Ontario who are interested in creating Open Educational Resources; however, there may be content within this book that is useful to others working on similar Open Educational Resource initiatives.

This book is a practical guide to adapting or creating open textbooks using the PressBooks platform. It is continually evolving as new information, practices and processes are developed. The primary audience for this book are faculty and post-secondary instructors in Saskatchewan, Canada who are developing, adapting or adopting open textbooks at the University of Saskatchewan. However, there may be content within this book that is useful to others working on similar Open Educational Resource initiatives.