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