Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Create

Creating and Sharing Your OER

Once you've explored what OERs already exist, you may decide that no existing OERs meet your needs or could be adapted or modified to meet them. If that's the case, you may decide you'd like to create your own OER. You may also have developed an OER adaptation and are looking to publish it. This page provides links to workflows, publishing guides, and publishing tools that you can use.

Publishing How Tos

Best Bet to Start

To get started and plan your OER creation process, check out this OER Workflow created by Billy Meinke and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Outreach College.

OER Creation Workflow

Resources on OER Publishing

Authoring Open Textbooks by Melissa Faldin and Karen Lauritsen
Content includes a checklist for getting started, publishing program case studies, textbook organization and elements, writing resources and an overview of useful tools.
The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) by Apurva Ashok and Zoe Wake Hyde
The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) is a living repository of collective knowledge, written to equip all those who want to publish open textbooks with the resources they need. The book is still growing and being added to over time.
BCcampus Open Education Self-Publishing Guide by Lauri M. Aesoph
This guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook.
A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students by Elizabeth Mays
A handbook for faculty interested in practicing open pedagogy by involving students in the making of open textbooks, ancillary materials, or other Open Educational Resources.

SUNY Creating, Licensing, and Publishing OER
This is an online course on OER creation, and it contains good information on assigning metadata, choosing a license, and other technical considerations. You can complete the entire course, or simply view the modules that interest you.
Open Textbook Network Publishing Course
This open course provides a detailed look at all aspects of publishing an OER, including several modules on different publishing platforms.

Publishing tools

Below are a number of OER publishing tools. When choosing one, it's important to consider how you hope others, including your students or other instutitions, will discover your work.

Michele DeSilva and Amy Hofer created this comparative analysis to help you understand the features and limitations of each tool.

OER Authoring Tools Comparison

Tools

Pressbooks
Contact the FRC to learn more about your options for acquiring a Pressbooks license
MERLOT Content Builder
Merlot offers both a free tool for creating OERs and hosting them.
OER Commons
A free to use tool that allows for OER creation, editing, remixing, and sharing.
Wikibooks
Allows users to create a book that's format resembles a wiki (think of Wikipedia pages) and easily allows you to invite collaborators and readers to contribute as well.
Calibre
An open source ebook editing and creating platform with the option to host your works, and to control usage/access to the texts you create and share.

Getting Reviews

To ensure the quality of your OER, you may decide to invite a colleague or other subject matter expert to review your OER. Or, you might decide to test your textbook in the classroom and gather student feedback to determine how it could be improved.

Things to consider:

A subject matter expert or professional colleague is best situated to provide feedback on the quality and accuracy of your information. BCcampus provides a rubric (linked below) to help your reviewers consider your work and provide constructive feedback.
You may decide to publish your reviews (usually as a letter) along with the text as proof of peer review. In which case, you should certainly secure the permission of your reviewer to do so.
Peer review is not the same thing as copyediting or proofreading (both of which are also necessary).

OER Reviewer Rubric

Kraemer Family Library

Open Educational Resources