As faculty, you assess textbooks against a set of criteria that reflects your long experience and knowledge of student needs. You do the same with Open Textbooks, but there are a few additional considerations.

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.

This online textbook addresses the population of individuals with disabilities that experience complex lifelong needs across multiple areas in their lives. Drs. Sennott and Loman drafted this book (along with the help from some friends) with the hope of providing pertinent, practical, and current resources to future special educators who plan to serve individuals with complex disabilities.

The objective of this module is to show the many ways you can quickly and easily find OER materials in OER Commons. This module, “Finding OER Materials,” is activity-based; you'll be guided through the process of finding OER materials you can start using in your teaching and learning.

Across the country, districts are choosing to #GoOpen and transitioning to the use of openly licensed educational resources to improve student learning in their schools. Openly licensed educational resources enable districts to reallocate significant funds currently spent on inflexible, static learning materials to resources and activities that accelerate the transition to digital learning. These include implementing new professional learning programs for teachers, developing a robust technology infrastructure to support digital learning, and funding new leadership roles for educators who curate and create openly licensed educational materials.

The #GoOpen District Launch Packet is designed for districts that have decided to implement a systematic approach to incorporating openly licensed educational resources into their curriculum by becoming a #GoOpen District.

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

Single lecture presentation containing tips for using technology to enhance teaching. Uses proven multimedia design principles to enhance learning.

Suppose you’re designing an online course. How might you use Open Educational Resources (OER)? Let’s take a quick look at a common model for instructional design – the ADDIE model. (There are many others but this one is very common and useful for our discussion.)

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.

Your action plan is an internal planning document for how you will convince key internal and external constituents to support for the work that you are doing. It is intended as a living document that you can revisit as you review the results of your advocacy activities and refine your advocacy strategy. Think of it as a skeleton you can work to fill in.

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.

Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for increasing equity and access to high-quality K–12 education. Many state education agencies now have offices devoted to identifying and using OERs and other digital resources in their states. To help states, districts, teachers, and other users determine the degree of alignment of OERs to the Common Core State Standards, and to determine aspects of quality of OERs, Achieve has developed eight rubrics in collaboration with leaders from the OER community.

The toolkit is made up of three elements:

1). information and resources to support your evaluation activities

2). an interactive tool to guide you through our Evaluation and Synthesis framework, providing an opportunity to submit findings, observations and links to evidence AND which feeds this back to you for inclusion in your project reporting mechanisms

3). examples of evaluation materials, instruments and reports from other UKOER projects

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 is a supplementary video for the Commonwealth of Learning Open Textbook Manual. It shows how to create Lessons in OER Commons. The OER Commons Lesson Builder allows instructors to create resources that are viewable by students as lessons, and by teachers as lesson plans with supplemental instructional resources.

This book represents a starting point towards curating and centering marginal voices and non-dominant epistemic stances in open education. It includes the work of 43 diverse authors whose perspectives challenge the dominant hegemony.

Production of Educational Videos is an introduction to technical communication that is situated in the production of educational videos; the assignments are all focused on the production of videos that teach some aspect of MIT's first-year core curriculum. The objective of these assignments is improvement in both communication ability and communication habits; these improvements are effected by providing participants with instruction, practice, feedback, and the opportunity for reflection. In addition to improvements in communication skills, improvement is expected in students' attitude towards writing, oral presentations, and collaboration; as the semester progresses, students should feel confident of their ability to write, present, and collaborate.

This document is an evidence-based guide that outlines the practical and policy supports needed to enable K-12 school librarians to take on leadership roles around OER, and to support OER curation efforts by librarians and all educators.



This guide is based on a study led by ISKME (iskme.org) in collaboration with Florida State University's School of Information. The study is titled “Exploring OER Curation and the Role of School Librarians". ISKME designs guides and toolkits that help educators navigate and implement new teaching and learning practices. Grounded in research, our evidence-based guides and toolkits help articulate what actually works in real education settings—and are tailored to the unique professional learning needs of our clients and their stakeholders.



The study was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (www.imls.gov), under grant number LG-86-17-0035-17. The findings and recommendations expressed in this document do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.