Open Educational Resources: Creating Open Resources

Authoring

• Authoring Open Textbooks by Melissa Falldin and Karen Lauritsen.
  • This guide is for faculty authors, librarians, project managers and others who are involved in the production of open textbooks in higher education and K-12. Content includes a checklist for getting started, publishing program case studies, textbook organization and elements, writing resources and an overview of useful tools.
• Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students, Elizabeth Mays, ed., Case studies and examples of applying open pedagogy to involve students in the creation of OER.
• Framework for Reviewing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism (IDEA) in Open Educational Resources
  • Considerations for creating inclusive OER/reviewing existing OER for inclusive content.
• Ten Steps to Developing an OER blog post by Jennifer A. McWatt.
• BC Open Accessibility Toolkit by Amanda Coolidge, Sue Doner, and Tara Robertson.
  • The Accessibility Toolkit is a collaboration between BCcampus and CAPER-BC. The goal of the Accessibility Toolkit is to provide the resources needed so that each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, teaching assistant, etc. has the opportunity to create a truly open and accessible textbook. An open textbook that is free and accessible for all students.The Accessibility Toolkit has also been translated into French.

Editing

• Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know by Cheryl Cuillier, Amy Hofer, Annie Johnson, Kathleen Labadorf, Karen Lauritsen, Peter Potter, Richard Saunders, Anita Walz.
  • This is a five-step guide for faculty, and those who support faculty, who want to modify an open textbook. Step-by-step instructions for importing and editing common open textbook file and platform types are included.

Funding

• ILA/IACRL: OER Campus Kickstart: Award for Growing Illinois OER Programs - This award provides funding for financial incentives to smaller college campuses and campuses with little or no support for OER programming to take some of their first steps. The intended outcome is collaboration between academic faculty and librarians to implement Open Educational Resources in their courses and help establish OER programs on their campus. Applications are due March 31st, 2023. 
• Federal Funding Opportunities through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has both the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program and National Leadership Grants for Libraries. - The National Leadership Porgram grants include opportunities for new models, new tools, research findings, services, practices, or facilitate partnerships and alliances that can be widely used, adapted at scale, or replicated. The Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program focuses on the library workforce.

Tools

• Pressbooks is a WordPress-based open source tool for authoring and publishing books.
• OER Commons is a freely accessible online library that allows teachers and others to search and discover OER and other freely available instructional materials. It includes three authoring tools: a resource building, lesson builder, and module builder. Authors sign-up for an OER Commons account and can start authoring immediately. The tools allow for authoring directly online or importing from Google Docs.
• The University of Oklahoma Libraries Markdown Converter is designed to help make open content, including open educational resources (OER), shareable to the fullest extent possible. By using the Markdown Converter, well-structured documents can be converted into PDF, HTML, EPUB, and DOCX file formats with an easy-to-use web interface instead of the command line. Markdown is a markup language that simplifies authoring for the web. Its syntax is both easy-to-read and easy-to-write using tools that come installed on all computers. Publishing OER in Markdown allows for easy editing, and then using the Markdown Converter to provide OER in multiple formats enables students to access OER content more readily.