Open Textbooks/Open Educational Resources: Locating & Using OER

Ask Your Librarian

Kathy Essmiller is Oklahoma State University's OER Librarian, and is available to provide support for faculty wanting to make the switch from commercial textbooks to using OER and library resources. Contacting Kathy is a great first step for those interested in locating and using OER. Email her at kathy.essmiller@okstate.edu.

Open Educational Resources are instructional materials intentionally created to be free to students. These materials are licensed by author/creators to permit and encourage distribution, modification, and retention. Resources may be in the form of textbooks, multimedia, full courseware, and more.

Use of Open Educational Resources encourages faculty experimentation and innovation, facilitates the practice of open pedagogy, and increases affordability of and access to educational experiences.

Researchers and educators making use of Open Educational Resources may adopt resources created by others, adapt resources for use by editing or combining elements of resources created by others, or create new openly licensed resources. The edited resources can then be re-published for further use and revision. 

The selection and use of OER centers faculty expertise and understanding of their students' needs. If you are considering moving from commercial textbooks to OER or library materials, you have the opportunity prioritize the learning resource characteristics you know will help you create a meaningful learning environment for OSU students. The first step is to identify your course learning goals, determine how you want students to engage with course content, and reflect on how you will assess your students' progress toward course learning goals. 

You already have a system in place you use to evaluate the resources you bring into your research and teaching experiences; that same system of evaluation can be used or adapted to identify the OER resource you would like to use. You might also discover pieces of several different OER you would like to combine to create a bespoke resource for your course.

This review checklist was developed by OSU faculty to help identify and prioritize elements of importance when exploring and evaluating available resources. You are welcome to copy/paste it into your own document, or download the document linked toward the bottom of this box.

OER Review Checklist

Resource Title/Link:

Reviewer's Name:

Focus/Relevance/Accuracy (Very Important)

• Is the focus of the resource appropriate for the course?
• Is the focus of the content useful for instructors and students?
• Does the content directly address one or more course objectives?

Comments:

• Is the information presented in the text accurate (based on your expert knowledge and external sources)?
• Are there major omissions of information?
• Are there spelling errors or typos?
• Has the text been peer-reviewed or published by a reputable, academic institution?

Comments:

Clarity/Readability/Quality (Very Important)

• Is the content, including any instructions, exercises, or supplemental material clear and comprehensible to students?
• Is the content appropriate for higher education?
• Is the content well-categorized in terms of logic, sequencing, and flow?
• Is the layout and interface well-organized and easy to navigate?
• Do the design features enhance learning?

Comments:

Accessibility (Very Important)

• Is the content available in alternative forms?
• For audio and video resources, is there a transcript or subtitles?
• Do web images have alternate text than can be read by screen readers?
• Is the content accessible to students with disabilities through the compatibility of third-party screen-reading applications?

Comments:

Supplementary Resources/Interactivity (Important)

• Does the OER/text contain any supplementary materials such as homework resources, study guides, tutorials, or assessments?
• Does the OER/text include access to instructor resources and presentations?
• Does the OER/text encourage active learning and class participation?
• Are there opportunities for students to test their understanding of the materials?
• Can students and instructors print the text?

Comments:

Adaptability/Licensing (Important)

• Does the license allow for educational reuse of the materials?
• Is the resource licensed in a way that allows for the resource to be easily divided into modules, sections, which can then be contextualized and reordered?
• Is the content licensed in a way that allows for adaptations and modifications?

Comments:

Other/Overall thoughts on the text:

OER Review Checklist by Sarah Hollingsworth is licensed CC-BY. It has been adapted from rubrics available through Affordable Learning Georgia.

Once you have identified your course learning goals and the type of resource you would like to use or create you can begin looking at what others in your field have created and shared.

There are many repositories and organizations that curate openly licensed materials. So where do you start? Pressbooks Directory, the Open Textbook Library, and OpenStax are well respected and widely used. They are a great place to begin your search.

Pressbooks Directory

The Pressbooks Directory collects and displays all public books created on PressbooksEDU networks (such as OpenOKState) in one searchable, filterable directory. These resources can very easily be imported into our OpenOKState platform and modified or mixed with other OER to create teaching, learning and research materials customized for your course and teaching style. It also enables increased visibility of OER modified or created by the OSU community. Once on the home page, you can click the 'Take the Tour' button if you welcome guidance about how to navigate the site.

Open Textbook Library

The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network, publishing OER created and used by faculty researchers in higher education. These resources have frequently been adopted and modified at a number of different institutions. Most are licensed such that they can be remixed and adapted for localized use, and the authors are open to further collaboration. The Open Education Network actively promotes these publications, which makes it a great place to share out your own work. OSU is a member institution which gives us access to some usage metrics for works our faculty have published in the Open Textbook Library. Contact kathy.essmiller@okstate.edu if you have created course materials you would like to see have a broader impact on your field; she can help curate them and submit them to the Open Education Network to be considered for publication. 

OpenStax

OpenStax is an educational initiative whose mission is to "transform learning so that education works for every student." This is a great place to look for traditional textbooks supporting large enrollment general education courses. They are very widely used. The texts are available for free online, and print versions can be made available for purchase through our bookstore. Each text has been created by a team of subject matter specialists under the guidance of a coordinating author. The books are licensed such that they can be modified and mixed with other similarly licensed resources, which comes in handy because they are fairly comprehensive and likely to include more material than you plan to cover in your course. Contact kathy.essmiller@okstate.edu if you find something there you want to consider; we can help customize it.

OASIS and the MASON Metafinder are federated search tools that can surface additional resources for you to consider. You may also discover projects underway, modules designed for use alongside other existing resources, and texts created to address niche topics.

OASIS

Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 52 different sources and contains 155,375 records.

MASON Metafinder

The Mason OER Metafinder searches across 18 sources of OER. This federated search will yield even very recently posted content from these sites. Results will update as the search continues running while you view your results. 

Not all open content is made to be used in the classroom, but that doesn’t mean you can’t integrate them into your course. Abbey Elder and Stacy Katz created a list of open access book chapters and openly-licensed media can be great additions to your course.

Open access publishers and repositories

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): Open Access journal articles

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): Open Access books

Project Gutenberg: Public domain books and documents

PubMed: Open access journal articles

Public Library of Science (PLoS): Open access journal publisher

Open Book Publishers: Open access book publisher

Openly licensed media

Creative Commons Search: A federated search tool for finding content available under a CC license

Digital Public Library of America: Public domain images, videos, recordings, and texts

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: High-quality open images from the Met

Pexels: Public domain and CC-licensed photographs and stock images

Unsplash: Public domain and CC-licensed photographs and stock images

Wikimedia Commons: Public domain and CC-licensed images and figures

Youtube: Videos. Use the Advanced Search/CC license option to see open content

Free Music Archive: Public domain and CC-licensed music and sound bytes

From Abbey K. Elder & Stacy Katz, The OER Starter Kit Workbook, CC-BY 4.0 International License.

All original content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. All linked and adapted content maintains its respective license. Portions of this guide are modified from "Guidelines to Open Educational Resources and Zero Textbook Cost" by Leila Walker, Queens College Library, licensed CC BY-NC, and The Ohio State University Affordable Educational Resources Initiative.