Open Educational Resources (OER): Integrating OER into Your Courses

The following suggestions for integrating OER into your courses come from the University of Minnesota Libraries' Partnership Program:

• Adopt an Open Textbook
  • You may be a biology professor and your class uses a traditional biology textbook that costs $200.
  • You could replace that costly publisher textbook with a biology Open Textbook from OpenStax College.
  • All of the online textbooks in the OpenStax College collection cost $0.
• Create Open Content
  • You may be an instructor that wants to create a freely available lab manual based on 10 years of lab notes.
  • You can use OER Commons, OpenStax CNX, or the Open Textbook Library to publish your lab notes and make them freely available to students.
  • You could also attach an open, Creative Commons license onto the new materials so that others worldwide may benefit.
• Students Help Write New Content
  • You may have the rough outline of a new open textbook or open educational resource that you would like to write, but you feel the available grant does not help much in getting your new materials created.
  • You could propose to have your students help create the content. Students could team up to write chapters or sections of your new textbook or resource as part of their assignments for the course.
  • Each semester you offer the course you could have students either add new content or modify existing content. In that way, you can keep your content fresh and up-to-date.
  • Librarians can help create your assignments and publish the new content.

Looking for a platform to host your OER? The Library can provide you with access to create your own site and content within Libguides (the platform on which this guide is hosted). For an idea of what this might look like, see examples at the link below.