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OER - Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational material that are freely available for teachers and students to use, adapt, share, and reuse.

Adoption Steps

As-Is or Adapt?

Decide whether you will be using the OER as-is, or if you would like to modify or adapt the resource in some way. If you choose to adapt, see our Adapt guide.

Distribute

Choose a method for distributing the OER to your students. This may be as simple as providing a link to the resource on a course website. Need help?  Our Center for Instructional Technology Expertise (CITE) lab can help. We have instructional designers to help you incorporate your link into your Canvas space. 

Attribute

An attribution statement gives credit to the author and lets others know how they can use the resource by including the open license information. For more information about attributing openly licensed materials, consult the Creative Commons guide

Tell the Author/Publisher

Authors and publishers may wish to be in touch with faculty who are using OER they have created, particularly open textbooks. The Open Logic Project, for example, requests that instructors fill out a form indicating how they used the Open Logic OER. Authors/publishers may also be able to provide additional support for using an OER, or you can join a community of instructors who are also using that OER.

Tell Your Librarian

We'd love to know about your experience and how we can support you in adopting OER. Contact your liaison librarian.

Creative Common Licenses

CC Licenses

Adopting 101

Now that you have found some resources here are some next steps. 

Once you've found the right resource, you may want to make modifications to suit your particular class! See the helpful guide for modifying Open Textbooks and OER, including examples from several common formats in the Adapt tab.