Before we discuss the benefits of OER in detail, please take a few minutes to watch this video from Abbey Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communications Librarian at Iowa State University. The video reviews the definition of OER but also provides a broad overview of why OER is an effective solution in addressing student barriers to high-quality learning materials. The video also provides examples of how faculty can use OER to enhance their teaching and improve student learning.

Modules 1-4 provided you with a solid introduction to various aspects of open educational resources such as the benefits to using OER, the 5R Framework, and open licensing. In this module, you will apply what you now know about OER and start finding the variety of open resources available to you. Through this module, you will be exposed to a variety of search strategies used in locating and finding relevant OER, and you will explore some of the more useful online repositories and sites which host OER. This module will also focus on elements of evaluating OER.

This module will provide a broad overview of OER across the state. This includes discussion of the results of a recent landscape survey by DigiTex, a snapshot look at recent Texas legislation related to OER, and a variety of examples from colleges and universities who are offering OER Degree pathways and OER courses across their curriculum.

Why do open educational resources matter? What is the point of using OER? Below are some of the benefits of using open educational resources that I have seen while working with OER over the past several years.

Student Success and First Year Experience are learning community courses at UTA that teach new students academic success skills to aid their transition to college. The goal of the courses is to help students identify their individual needs, determine what resources are appropriate, recognize the faculty role in their development, and formulate a plan for an actively engaged and enriched experience from campus to career. The courses will be taught by Peer Academic Leaders (PALs) and faculty, staff and/or graduate students to provide guidance, raise awareness and understanding of students' majors and help support collaborative and co-curricular opportunities available within the School/College. This open educational resource is the required textbook for both courses.

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.

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.

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.

Making the Case for OER

Use the plays to build a network of supporters who will advocate for the change you want to make.

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.

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. Although some chapters contain more advanced content, the starter kit is primarily intended for users who are entirely new to Open Education. [Version 1.1. Revised September 5th, 2019.]

The OER Starter Kit Workbook is a remix of the OER Starter Kit to include worksheets to help instructors practice the skills they need to confidently find, use, or even create open educational resources (OER). We welcome instructors, librarians, instructional designers, administrators, and anyone else interested in OER to explore the OER Starter Kit Workbook.

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.

The aim of the Open Education Design - Course for Practitioners is to equip the participants with basic knowledge, practical advice and hands-on experience to prepare them for their own design of Open Educational Resources (OER).

During the 5-day course, the participants became familiar with open education design processes, methods and tools. They learned from OER experts and practitioners how to align open education with developmental and strategic goals, they got basic knowledge about OE concepts, about pedagogical and didactical issues as well as about content related issues in OE.

To empower the participants for making a crucial step from an idea to the implementation of concrete OERs, platforms and tools for open education design was addressed, followed with hands-on experience and a session on OER evaluation.

The OEL Toolkit is openly available and openly licensed. The guidance generated by the OEL Toolkit is of primary relevance to educators and developers working within Australian higher education institutions. The OEL Toolkit web application has been designed with a focus on ease of use. It provides relevant information for users seeking guidance on using, creating, modifying or sharing a specific Open Educational Resource.

This report is based on an independent survey commissioned in 2019 by the Digital Higher Education
Consortium of Texas (DigiTex), in collaboration with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB),
and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME).

The entire spirit of this book project reflects the editors’ shared belief in the power of an open and inclusive community, of learning, and of collaboration toward innovation. From the outset, the editors knew that this book would be an open project in its own right. It had to be published openly (to practice what we preach), and it would serve as an opportunity to learn the process of creating an open book from start to finish, including, for example, developing review criteria that would ensure rigor, diversity, inclusion, and ingenuity while drawing from the open community to involve both novice and expert OP practitioners both as authors and readers.