Skip to Main Content

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Adopt, Adapt, & Create OER

This page will help educators identify whether adapting, adopting, or creating OER will best fit their needs. A workflow model has been included for managing the processes of an OER project, and resources by BCCampus for full adoption and adaption are included as well.

Adopt, Adapt, or Create?

If there are high-quality, vetted OER available on the topic your course covers, and you do not feel the need to edit or otherwise alter them for use in your course, you might consider adopting them for use "as is." Adopting is the simplest way of including OER in your course, and the least time-intensive. 

"Open Educational Resources (OER)" by Iowa State University Library

If there are OER available on the topic your course covers, but they are dated, too broad, or contain information which is beyond the scope of your course, you may want to consider adapting the materials. After checking that the Creative Commons license attached to the materials allows for adaptation, you may choose to edit the materials to tailor them to your course.

If there are no high-quality OER available on your topic or if you have course materials that you believe are superior to the OER available to you online, you may want to consider creating or licensing your own course materials. Creating Open Educational Resources can be as simple as openly licensing and sharing a syllabus you currently use or sharing lesson plans on OER repositories like OER Commons. Other OER creation processes, such as publishing open textbooks, can be more complex.

OER Workflow Model

OER Workflow Model

OER adoption, adaptation, and creation is unique. While providing a general workflow for an OER project can be difficult to do, you should understand the overall process involved with most OER projects. This model was created with the intention of simplifying the major steps in an OER project so scoping such work would be manageable. A more comprehensive description of the phases can be found in the UH OER Training Guide. To create your own copy of the Workflow Model, click on File > Make a copy.

 

  • Priming Phase: Ask key questions about your potential adoption or creation; after completing a basic training or consultation and performed a cursory search of content that may work for you.
  • Pre-production: Refine project goals and create planning documents for managing processes and resources. 
  • Design: Outline content and confirm major planned revisions of existing OER. you have found for the project. Scope any planned media here. Before leaving this phase, you should have a clear idea of both what you are building and how it will get done.
  • Development: Move existing OER into a shared editing environment to ease collaboration. Feedback and new content are added and the changes are revised by the collaborators. Track and annotate changes.
  • Publishing: This is the final step where we select the final publishing platform to be used. If print on demand and advanced typesetting are needed to complete the project, they are done in this step. 

by Billy Meinke and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Outreach College, under a CC BY 4.0. International license.

Video: Creating OER

"Creating Open Educational Resources" by Abbey Elder contains 5 tips for instructors creating OER for the first time.

Adoption & Adaption Guides

 

Adoption Guide – 2nd Edition by Lauri M. Aesoph/Arianna Cheveldave

Section 1: address three groups involved in open textbook adoption: instructors, post-secondary institutions, and students. Section 2: focuses on operational aspects of adoption: surveying instructors about, tracking usage of, and reporting out about open textbooks. Section 3: provides additional adoption information.

The Adaptation Guide 

This guide is a practical reference about how to customize — or adapt — an open textbook so that it better fits your needs in the classroom and elsewhere. This guide defines the term adaptation and discusses reasons for revising a book, why this is possible with an open textbook, and the challenges involved.