Open Textbooks/Open Educational Resources: Faculty & Instructors

There are several reasons to consider adopting or developing OER. Use of OER can reduce cost barriers, ensure students have access to course materials before class starts and that they can continue accessing the materials once the course is complete. The openly licensed nature of OER allows faculty to center their expertise and contextualize the resources to meet OSU students' needs. Many platforms facilitate integration of multimedia and interactivities, and since the resources are openly licensed faculty can easily collaborate to build on each other's work and grow a pool of shared resources. Additionally, OSU faculty creation and adaptation of OER can be documented and included as scholarly work in evaluation processes.

For guidance regarding instructional design and course development, check out events and opportunities provided by the OSU Institute for Teaching and Learning Excellence. Read Project Management for Textbook Creation to discover an effective, proven workflow. Designing an Open Pedagogy Project can help surface steps toward developing scope and sequence, learning goals, and building on your own innovative teaching practices.

There are many resources and platforms available for authoring, publishing, and sharing your OER. Consider the following questions as you explore:

• What platforms am I already comfortable using? Do i want to learn to use a new tool as I author my OER?
• What platforms are my students most comfortable using? Will authoring or publishing in a particular platform require them to learn a new tool? Will this distract from the course content?
• If someone wants to reuse or adapt my content, will it be simple for them to do that with the format(s) I've made available?
• Do I have the budget to pay for access to a tool for advanced features in an otherwise free tool?

This Digital Learning Innovation blog post from the University of Toronto provides a helpful introduction to resources and tools used for openly licensed publishing.

OSU Libraries provide access to the Pressbooks publishing platform for faculty and instructor use modifying or developing OER.

OSU Libraries provide access to and support for use of Pressbooks and OERCommons; however, there are a number of other authoring and publishing platforms that might fit your needs.

Bookdown

Bookdown is an open source R package that structures book writing and workflow. Those who want to create statistics and programming textbooks may find it a useful fit. 

GitBook

GitBook is an online platform to create and host books. Existing GitHub users will likely feel most comfortable with GitBook; others may find it overwhelming at first.

OER Commons

OER Commons is a public digital library of openly licensed resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world. OSU faculty and instructors also have access to the OER Commons creation tool Open Author through Open Learn Oklahoma. Watch the OSU Libraries event calendar for opportunities to exploring using OER Commons and Open Author.

Open Monographs Press

Open Monograph Press is an open source software platform for managing the editorial workflow required to see monographs, edited volumes and scholar editions through internal and external review, editing, production and publication.

Wikibooks

This open authoring platform is a project of Wikipedia. You will need to use Wikitext markup language to create in Wikibooks, but those with HTML experience will quickly feel comfortable. In Wikibooks, like Wikipedia, all content is open to editing. This is a good platform to use if you are interested in crowdsourcing content. It does not, however, offer a high level of control over the original copy.

In response to student requests, the OSU Libraries have partnered with the Office of the Registrar to identify courses which do not require students to purchase commercial materials. If you are a faculty member, instructor, or graduate student and would like a course you are teaching added to the list, please complete the Individual Course Marking form. If you are a faculty member or instructor and would like to request multiple sections of a course be marked as not requiring students to purchase commercial materials, please complete the Multiple Sections Course Marking form. Information needed to complete the form includes

• Semester you are requesting your course be eligible for course marking
• Course Subject (Ex: ENGL)
• Course Number (Ex: 1113)
• Instructor Name
• Instructor Title/Rank
• Instructor Email
• Number of students who may enroll in the course
• Types of resources used in the course (Ex: Open/OER Textbook, Library Resources, Instructor Created Resources, Specified Other)
• Title of the resource(s) which will be used in the course? (if you are not using a 'book', say library resources or instructor resources)
• Format of resources (Ex: physical copies, links through Canvas, etc.)
• Link to resource which will be used, or uploaded copy of the resource where possible (not necessary for use of multiple journal articles or instructor created materials)
• Draft syllabus (does not need to be accurate or pretty)

Course marking information for Spring 2026 courses will need to be submitted by the fifth week of the Fall 2025 semester.

Email kathy.essmiller@okstate.edu if you have questions!

Updated 8.18.25, KE