Open Educational Resources (OER) are aimed at providing free, high quality educational materials to as many learners’ as possible. OER resources can be edited, combined with other works, redistributed, duplicated, printed, and used in virtually any other way you could want. Many OER authors will use a CC license to provide rights to their works.

Our goal is to incorporate Open Educational Recourses (OER) as often as possible.  Utilizing OER in our courses helps to reduce financial barriers for students, as well as helps to ensure that students have immediate access to the learning materials as soon as courses become available to them in Canvas.  We recognize that finding quality OER content that aligns with specific course objectives is not always feasible.  Even if your course utilizes a textbook as its primary source, you can use the resources below to find or create additional learning materials.

Content Sources and Portals

The best content sources for courses are openly licensed with Creative Commons designations. Open licensing means that we can use the content in many applications without being constrained by copyright law. To throw a wide net, you can use tools provided by Creative Commons such as:

• Creative Commons Search
  • searches sources like Google and YouTube for any content type
• Creative Commons Image Search
  • searches specifically for image content

OER Sources

Sources for full texts or videos

Various course design project teams have used OER sources like those linked below. These sources have whole textbooks, documents, videos, images, and other content types. In some cases you can find full courses.

Some of the most popular include:

• Pressbooks Directory
• OpenStax 
• Saylor Academy 
• NOBA (psychology) 
• Khan Academy 

Suggestions for finding OER images

• Wikimedia Commons
• Pixabay 
• Unsplash 
• Pexels 
• Diversity and Inclusion OER Images
  • Nappy
  • Disabled and Here
  • The Gender Spectrum
  • WOCinTech

Repositories that aggregate various OER sources

There are also a number of portals that seek to collect OER from various, disparate locations. These repositories often offer a more centralized location to find content for your course development project, but it may take longer to sift through the resources.

• Hatch Library OER Repositories and Databases
• OERCommons 
• MERLOT 
• Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER)

Even when you find a resource on an OER portal, it is important to track down the original content rights of the material. In other words, don’t assume that everything found on a portal is going to be freely open to use for our purposes. We have run into issues where we find a resource on an OER site, but then the exact CC license type does not meet our criteria. Your instructional designer will be a great resource to bounce ideas around to ensure we have the correct license types that we need to use selected resources in a course.

Attribution and Citation

Regardless of the format (text, image, video) or the license type (Creative Commons or permissible through other licensing agreements), it is essential that you give credit to the creator(s) of the resources you find. If the content is licensed under Creative Commons, format your attribution according to Creative Commons best practices.. Otherwise, cite material you wish to include using the APA style manual.

All attributions must include:

1. Title
2. Author
3. Source
4. License

“title.” by author. Retrieved from: URL. Licensed under: CC-BY 2.0

Attribution example:

• “Frequently Confused Words.” by Khan Academy. Retrieved from: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/gram mar/usage-and-style/frequently-confused-words/v/affect-and-effect-final Licensed under: CC BY-SA 3.0

APA citation example:

• Scott, F. (Director). (2012). Introduction to Anatomy and Physiology: Characteristics of living things [Motion Picture].

Contact your instructional designer if you have any questions about CC licenses, attribution, or OER.

Creating Your Own Learning Material and Tools

If the scope of your project allows, we encourage you to consider creating your own learning materials and introducing interactive tools for student engagement. You may find yourself working on projects where open access and accessible resources are hard to come by. In these instances, you can create demonstrations in multiple modalities. There a variety of tools available for your use:

• Video and Audio

  • Screencast-o-matic – Capture videos and audio on your computer screen (recommended)
  • PowToon – Create animated videos
  • EdPuzzle – Add audio and assessment questions within a video
  • FlipGrid  – Interactive video discussion for students

If you are creating your own content to be used in a course offered in TAWC’s centralized course model, remember to introduce yourself as a Subject Matter Expert and not an instructor, as many individuals may teach sections of the course.