In This Section:
By the end of this module, you should be able to:
In the previous five modules, you've learned a great deal about open educational resources and how they can be used as effective teaching and learning material in your courses. In this module, you will gain experience in applying what you’ve learned to successfully adopt, adapt, and create an OER.
In most cases, you may find yourself adopting existing open educational resources, sometimes in whole as is, at other times with some modifications or remixing. However, there may also be instances where you have not been able to find an OER that meets your needs. Perhaps you’ve found the perfect open textbook, but it lacks ancillary material such as PowerPoint slides or test bank questions. Alternatively, maybe the open textbook you were hoping to adopt doesn’t exist yet. In those examples, you may find the need to create your own OER to fully meet your needs and the needs of your students.
View the video below to get a brief introduction to creating OER.
The video outlines 5 tips for creators:
In addition, here several other things to keep in mind:
There are plenty of great resources and creation tools to help get you started, most of them freely available. You might first consider those that you are already familiar with, such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Google Slides, or Blackboard.
Of course, part of creating an open educational resource is deciding which open license you will apply to it. If you control the copyright of all of your OER's content, you can choose whichever license you like. If, however, you have included content from other OER in addition to your own work, the license will depend upon how the other OER were licensed. Refer to Module 5 to review how licenses can be combined.
Note: Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license from using the work according to that license. You can stop offering your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish, but this will not affect the rights associated with any copies of your work already in circulation under a Creative Commons license. So, you need to think carefully when choosing a Creative Commons license to make sure that you are happy with people being able to use your work consistent with the terms of the license, even if you later stop distributing your work.
While open licenses can be applied to any type of media, not just text, the method for applying the license varies for each format. Here are some suggestions for handling licenses on different media types:
Text documents including textbooks, articles, and blog posts, are often the simplest to license. Simply include a copyright statement on the title page, footer, or other reasonable location. Including the CC license badge is not required, but can be a helpful visual cue. For example:
© Drake University. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
For web content, it’s important to not only mark the website visually (usually in a footer) as openly licensed, but also include the requisite metadata to ensure that search engines can identify the webpage as openly licensed. If you use the license chooser from Creative Commons, the HTML code provided to embed the license in a webpage will ensure it is properly marked.
It is recommended to put a brief bumper at the beginning or end of a video with the license information that is easily readable. If using a Creative Commons license, include the image of the license badge to make the license extra visible. When posting the video online, it is also recommended to indicate the license in the video metadata. Both Vimeo and YouTube provide open licensing options, and you can also specify the license information in the description field.
If the audio file is such that a brief statement of the license at the end would not be disruptive, simply appending a copyright statement at the end is recommended. If the audio file is such that a spoken version of the license would be disruptive, it is recommended that the license information be included in any description of the file posted online. Many audio sharing websites permit users to indicate the specific license. If this is not offered, simply add the license in the description field.
ImageMany image sharing sites now provide the ability to mark images as openly licensed upon uploading. It is best to include license information through metadata or the image description as opposed to a watermark or caption, to avoid detracting from the image.
For PowerPoint slides or infographics, license statements can be incorporated into the design in such a way that they provide users with the necessary information without detracting from the work itself.
Many OER advocates argue that any work with a no derivatives restriction should not be considered as OER at all. Do you agree? Why or why not?
The deadline for completing this module and responding to the discussion question is Friday, November 17.
Information in this module was modified from multiple sources, including:
