Research Guides: OER How-To at Guttman Community College: Finding OERs to Create/Remix

Toolkit for Faculty

This 6-minute introduction to the ins and outs of open licensing was created by Open Oregon. The other video tutorials mentioned in the presentation are available from Open Oregon's YouTube page.

Set aside time: Searching for OER takes time & persistence, just like research.
Look at your current text: Is your current textbook available through the library databases?
Locate an OER text: Check to see if a whole OER textbook already exists for your course.
Browse open repositories: Browse several repositories to see what content is available
Supplement: Look at your learning objectives and find different materials for different topics.
Ask for help: Call a librarian to get help. You can do this at anytime!

"Six Steps to OER" Modified text from original by Lesley University Library

OER 101 Course
Guttman's OER 101 Introduction course is available on Canva
Tutorial: Creating and Modifying Open Educational Resources
This is an excellent tutorial by Affordable Learning Georgia on how to create your own OER and adapt others' OER to your course.
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources
A Guide for Authors, Adapters & Adopters of Openly Licensed Teaching and Learning Materials by Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI)
MI ExplOER Search Strategy Template
Use MI ExplORE Search Template to organize your search
OER Handbook for Educators
Handbook designed to help educators find, use, develop and share OER to enhance their effectiveness online and in the classroom.
PressBooks User Guide
This guide is designed to provide help for various parts of the book production process on Pressbooks and includes dozens of chapters ranging across many aspects of writing, publishing, and configuring a book.

Finding OERs:

At Guttman's repository
At CUNY
On the web by discipline:

Browse open content on Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) search engine:

An introduction to the four POUR principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust) that make for a more accessible experience in learning materials.

Just like traditional textbooks, open educational materials must be accessible to all students. Below are resources that help with accessibility standards for OER.

Creative commons license spectrum between public domain (top) and all rights reserved (bottom). Left side indicates the use-cases allowed, right side the license components. The dark green area indicates Free Cultural Works compatible licenses, the two green areas compatibility with the Remix culture. The bright green area alone can be seen as similar to the "fair use" concept, and the yellow area to the "freeware" concept.

"Creative Commons license spectrum" by Shaddim (CC BY 4.0)

To determine the Terms of Use for your work, Creative Commons & Fair Use and Creative Commons Licensing is a good place to start.

Faculty Evaluation Guide
From the BC Open Campus, provides an excellent checklist and suggestions for evaluating OER in your course.
OER Evaluation Tool Handbook (from Achieve)
This handbook has been designed to walk a user through the process of evaluating an online resource using the Achieve Open Education Resources Rubrics.

Criteria should include:

Content: academic and pedagogical value, relevance, and accuracy
Comprehensiveness: coverage of all areas and concepts in the course
Attribution: complies with intellectual property law and permission guidelines
Organization: clarity, consistency, and context support instruction & learning
Accessibility: compliance with ADA web standards via various devices
Navigation: no navigational problems, image distortions, or broken links
Modularity: ease of incorporation into stand-alone contexts that facilitate re-mixing and re-use
Cultural relevance: cultural sensitivity and inclusiveness of a variety of races, ethnicities, and backgrounds

Based on criteria developed by the City Tech OER Fellowship

Fair Use Resources Available for Use

Fair Use dictates that parts of materials on the web can be used in some instances without license. This would include non-commercial educational purposes

In general, Copyright Law prohibits reproducing and distributing copyrighted works. A simple way to provide access to copyright-protected materials is to link to them, rather than reproduce the content. This works well for materials available in the library databases, as well as works available for free (but not freely licensed) on legitimate websites.

When linking is not possible, the "Fair Use Doctrine" (Section 107) allows a limited amount of copying for purposes such as teaching and scholarship. In determining whether the use made of a work in a particular case is a Fair Use, the factors to be considered include:

The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes;
The nature of the copyrighted work;
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyright work as a whole; and
The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Watch this short video posted on YouTube, created by the Copyright Clearance Center to find out more info on using copyrighted works.

Section 1: Supporting Teaching and Learning with Access to Library Materials via Digital Technologies

Fair Use Repositories

Listen Notes
This site lives up to its claim of being "the best podcast search engine." Keyword search to find podcasts by topic or presenter, or browse categories and recommended lists.

Recommended educational podcasts:

Image result for youtube icon

OpenLearn from The Open University
minutephysics
"134 youTube Channels that Will Make You Smarter"
Films on Demand
Streaming educational videos and documentaries.

These sites tend to have a lot of K-12 content. Many sites will have a search filter to view just college-level material. These are just a few examples; search the web for organizations relevant to your topic and check out their educational resources.

Recommended non-profit sites:

Recommended museum sites:

Strategies for Using GovDocs for OER

General searches at USA.gov
Look for GAO, CRS or CBO reports. See this guide for detailed help finding government reports.
Try one of the 5 National Libraries
Narrow down to specific Agencies.
1. ex. USDA v. National Ag Library v. USDA Economic Research Service
2. Some agencies aren't .gov ex. si.edu, hsdl.org

Everything published by the Federal government is free of any copyright restrictions. The research, reports and websites can be useful resources for classes when creating your own course material.

A great starting place to search is USA.gov.
Try to search a specific agency's website. A-Z List of Federal Agencies. Many times these materials are not retrieved with simple Google searches. Here are some examples of US Federal Databases.

The Homeland Security Digital Library is a collection of documents related to homeland security policy, strategy, and organizational management. Topics include maritime, unmanned aerial systems, terrorism, epidemics and many more.