Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: OER Creation

Guidance for OER Creation

In addition to subject specific open materials for your courses, the OER community creates materials to offer tips and guidance for authoring your own materials. Below is a curated list of manuals that you can turn to for structure and ideas in authoring your own course materials:

OER Creation Toolkit
The text is broken into five sections: Getting Started, Copyright, Finding OER, Teaching with OER, and Creating OER. Although some chapters contain more advanced content, the starter kit is primarily intended for users who are entirely new to Open Education. The toolkit will be updated periodically as relevant information for inclusion is identified.
Tools for Creating OER
There are a number of commercial and open source digital technologies available for the creation of open resources. This resource is intended to provide the OER community with a summary of some currently available tools for creating open content.
Accessibility Toolkit
The goal of the Accessibility Toolkit - 2nd Edition is to provide resources for each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open textbook—one that is free and accessible for all students. This is a collaboration between BCcampus, Camosun College, and CAPER-BC.
The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far)
a living repository of collective knowledge, written to equip all those who want to publish open textbooks with the resources they need. Representing two years of collaboration, innumerable conversations and exchanges, and a wide range of collective knowledge and experience, the Guide is a book-in-progress and will evolve and grow over time.
Authoring Open Textbooks
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.

Tools for Creating OER

The most familiar and efficient way to begin OER creation is often to use word processing tools such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Materials can be designed in these platforms and then shared with an audience via course management system, email, or online repository. Some authors might also choose to create and host their material with a blogging platform like Wordpress, as a website, or a as a wiki.

Here are a few other options for getting started with OER creation:

Pressbooks
Authors can write directly in Pressbooks or import the manuscript into it later. It's built on WordPress, so anyone familiar with using WordPress may be comfortable using this tool. In addition to a making an online book, you're simultaneously creating your book in a variety of file formats, including EPUB, PDF, HTMLBook, and XML formats.
Pressbooks User Guide
Welcome to the Pressbooks User Guide! Find answers for common questions you may have while writing and publishing your book with the Pressbooks authoring and editing platform.
Open Author - OER Commons
OER Commons is a an online resource that you can use to locate OER, store and share your own OER, and Open Author helps you build and publish Open Educational Resources for you and for the benefit of educators and learners everywhere.
It's More Than a Textbook
An e-text authoring platform for creating low cost, interactive e-texts.

Advanced Tools (Data Science Solutions)

GitBook
Created by GitHub, GitBooks is an open source tool that allows you to create a textbook that is hosted in a GitHub repository. You can create your content in Markdown or embed rich, multimedia content.
Bookdown
Bookdown is an open source R package that structures book writing and workflow. Faculty who want to create statistics and programming textbooks may find it useful. Supported languages include R, C/C++, Python, and SQL as well as LaTeX.
Jupyter Notebook
Jupyter Notebooks is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. It supports over 40 programming languages, including Python, R, Julia, and Scala.