Getting Started With OER

NEBHE is committed to helping stakeholders understand the value of open education to provide students with equitable access to high-quality, low-cost postsecondary education instructional materials. Below is a list of curated resources to help practitioners new to OER and those in institutional leadership positions get started. If you’re looking for something specific, please contact Lindsey Gwozdz, Fellow, Open Education at lgwozdz@nebhe.org.

 

Webinars on Open Education and OER

Action Planning for Advancing Open Education

Use this fillable PDF as a guide to start making concrete steps towards strategically advancing Open Education. Please email lgwozdz [@] nebhe [dot] org for an editable Canva template!
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OER Policy Development Tool

The OER Policy Development Tool can help you quickly get started developing OER-friendly policy for your institution. This freely available, interactive policy-builder tool was developed by Amanda Coolidge (Senior Manager Open Education, BCcampus and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow) and Daniel DeMarte (Chief Academic Officer, Tidewater Community College and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow). Designed for college and university governance officials and those with responsibility for leading OER initiatives, it walks through various dimensions of OER-related policy and provides sample language institutions can use to define and implement these policies.
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Tips for Senior Leaders

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OER Mythbusting

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Where is the ‘Justice’ in Open Education?

Open education frameworks address high-cost course materials, but with an increase in the adoption of open educational materials, conversations about inclusive teaching, social justice, and anti-racism pedagogical practices need to be at the center of open practices. Ohio State Professor Jasmine Roberts’ talk will address the urgency of adopting social justice practices in open education and strategies on how to do this.
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Open Pedagogy in practice: faculty perspectives

Open pedagogy, OER-enabled pedagogy, Open educational practices — you may have heard these terms in passing or maybe you’ve heard a lot about them but still find yourself asking the question, “but what does this actually look like in practice?”
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Supporting students in OER

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OER Starter Kit Workbook

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Course Marking

Getting Started with Course Marking

Course marking, or tagging courses that utilize OER, low-cost, or other no-cost course materials provide students with the power and agency to make informed course registration decisions based on their own financial situations. Practitioners from the Northeast, Marcel Raisbeck, Kevin Corcoran, and Andrew McKinney, will provide a broad overview of course marking definitions, share examples, and provide attendees with a roadmap to get started.
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Lessons Learned from the Field

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Vendor & Technology Considerations

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Course marking recommendations

Check out our top 10 recommendations for institutions looking to implement course marking on their campus.
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Course marking roadmap

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Managing instructor changes

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OER Repositories

Below you will find repositories that host open educational resources from a range of publishers and sources.

OER Commons

  • Created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Open Massachusetts: A Public Higher Education Repository

  • A platform for sharing OER created and adopted by faculty from Massachusetts Public Higher Education institutions.

Creative Commons

  • An international nonprofit organization that empowers people to grow and sustain the thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture.

Open Textbook Library

  • These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. The library currently includes 721 textbooks, with more being added all the time.

BCcampus OpenEd

  • Open Access Textbooks repository with all content available to read and download for free.

Pressbooks Directory

  • A free, searchable catalog that includes 8,007 open access books published by 198 organizations and networks using Pressbooks. It’s easy to copy, revise, remix, and redistribute any openly licensed content found here using Pressbooks’ publishing platform.

OASIS

  • SUNY’s OER search tool, OASIS (Openly Available Sources Integrated Search) can be used to locate openly licensed content such as textbooks, TED Talks, teaching resources, course modules, interactive simulations, and more. OASIS currently searches open content from 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records.

You can also search OASIS by subject.

 

You can find more repositories and a list of OER Publishers by following this link.

Webinar (recording): Leveraging OER During Covid-19)

OER not only saves students substantial out-of-pocket costs, but, in our current climate, they also offer significant advantages to help protect the health and well-being of students, particularly those who depend on traditional campus services, such as the library, or share physical resources with their classmates for access to their required learning materials.
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OER & COVID-19 Talking Points

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Open Ed Homepage