FDU LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: Adopt, Adapt, Create OER

Adopting OER

Adopting OER means including OER materials in your course without making significant revisions to the materials. These materials may include textbooks, chapters, eBooks, worksheets, videos, modules, slides, and more. This is a great way to get started with OER as you can use as little or as much of a resource as needed.

You can use our Finding OER page to find OER for your course.

OpenNJ

OpenNJ is a repository of OER materials created by New Jersey universities and colleges. It hosts full courses, textbooks, slides, lectures, modules, activities, labs, lesson plans, assessments, exams, and more. Managed by Middlesex College, OpenNJ is a great place to get started with adopting OER.

Adopting OER Books

The OER Starter Kit by Abbey Elder
This starter kit has been created to provide instructors with an introduction to the use and creation of open educational resources (OER). The text is broken into five sections: Getting Started, Copyright, Finding OER, Teaching with OER, and Creating OER.
Faculty OER Toolkit by Shannon Moist
The Faculty OER Toolkit is an information resource about and guide to adapting and adopting Open Educational Resources. Included are definitions and examples, information about Creative Commons licensing, and tips on how to adapt and/or adopt OER for classroom use.
The Evolution of Affordable Content Efforts in the Higher Education Environment by Kristi Jensen (Editor); Shane Nackerud (Editor)
Provides both inspiration and guidance for those beginning work on affordable content and evidence of the growth that has occurred in this arena over the last decade.

Adapting OER

Adapting (or revising, modifying, altering, customizing) OER involves making changes to existing OER materials to make the materials more relevant to your course. You might adapt an OER to add additional information, update with current events, adjust the teaching style, address the needs of your students, translate materials into another language, and more.

Creative Commons

When adapting OER, it is important to understand the resource's license. This will influence exactly how the resource can be used, revised, and shared. Often, open resources will use Creative Commons Licenses. FDU Libraries has also created a Guide to Creative Commons, which is located within our Open Access Guide.

Adapting OER Books

Adaptation Guide by Lauri M. Aesoph
The Adaptation Guide is a practical reference about how to customize — or adapt — an open textbook so that it better fits your needs in the classroom and elsewhere. This guide defines the term adaptation and discusses reasons for revising a book, why this is possible with an open textbook, and the challenges involved.
Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know by Cheryl Cuillier, Amy Hofer, Annie Johnson, Kathleen Labadorf, Karen Lauritsen, Peter Potter, Richard Saunders, Anita Walz
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.

Creating OER

To create OER means to author a new resource using an open license. You may choose to create a course, textbook, module, worksheet, and more. While this may seem like a large undertaking, there are many resources and guides that can help guide you in creating your open resource.

Helpful Tools

Open Textbook Publishing Orientation Course
A free course from the University of Minnesota, open to everyone in the Canvas learning management system.
Pressbooks Publishing Platform
Pressbooks is the versatile, user-friendly publishing platform educators rely on to create, adapt, and share accessible, interactive, web-first books.
Open Author - OER Commons
Open Author, from OER Commons, helps you build and publish OER for you and for the benefit of educators and learners everywhere.
Open Publishing - Open Textbook Collaborative/OpenNJ
OpenPublishing, embedded into the OpenNJ, provides a space to create and host OER learning objects.

Creating OER Books

Authoring Open Textbooks by Melissa Falldin, Karen Lauritsen
This guide is for faculty authors, librarians, project managers and others who are involved in the production of open textbooks. Content includes a checklist for getting started, publishing program case studies, textbook organization and elements, writing resources and an overview of useful tools.
The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) by Apurva Ashok; Zoe Wake Hyde; and Kaitlin Schilling
Publication Date: 2022
is a a living repository of collective knowledge, written to equip all those who want to publish open textbooks with the resources they need.

Open Educational Resources: Adopt, Adapt, Create OER