Open Textbooks/Open Educational Resources: Creating & Teaching with OER

If you've checked the OER repositories but haven't found anything that meets your needs, you still have options! You can remix or adapt existing OER, create your own OER, or include your students in collaborative development of resources as part of your course activities.

Adapt existing OER

The licenses used to designate open educational resources communicate in what ways creators invite others to edit, adapt, update, and distribute materials. For more information about these licenses, skim "Creative Commons Licenses" in Exploring Open or visit the Copyright and Creative Commons guide.

Create OER

Do you have lecture notes, videos, or other resources that you've used to supplement textbook materials in the past? These can often be expanded or paired with an existing OER to create materials that suit the particular needs of your classroom.

Develop OER with your students

As students create valuable resources for others, they learn the material themselves and develop an understanding of how knowledge is produced and disseminated. For more specific ideas, skim "What is Open Pedagogy" and "Designing an Open Pedagogy Project," or read A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students. For an even deeper dive into open pedagogy, visit Open Pedagogy Toolkit, a multi-institutional, collaboratively authored resource intended to provide support for anyone interested in creating openly licensed resources.

Have you developed an open educational resource, whether a textbook, assignment, or syllabus? Be sure to submit it to Open Research Oklahoma, OpenOKState, or Open Learn Oklahoma  so your colleagues can benefit from your knowledge. Contact kathy.essmiller@okstate.edu to find other places to share out your work. 

Teaching with OER can provide collaborative, creative opportunities for active, experiential, meaningful learning. Our OSU faculty and instructors are innovative educators who are responsive to the needs of OSU students. The OSU Institute for Teaching and Learning Excellence hosts events which bring OSU educators to share and discover effective classroom strategies. Visit the Learning Library, Open Pedagogy Notebook, and Teaching with OER site to see what is happening on other campuses.

L4: Living Lab Learning Library

A resource exchange for innovative teaching practices from City Tech. Find activities that "worked for us" organized by discipline.

Open Pedagogy Notebook

Browse through the examples of open pedagogy, which include both classroom-tested practices and budding ideas, and to consider contributing examples of your own experiments with open pedagogy.

Teaching with OER

This site showcases OER teaching artifacts and OER materials created and used by college professors at the City University of New York.

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.