Check out these websites and tools to help you create your own open educational resource, whether from scratch or by adapting and combining materials from other OERs.
This extensive list of tools includes both free and priced options.
This article from Affordable Learning Georgia provides tips for OER authors.
OER Commons, one of the largest databases of OERs, has three tools to help you create materials, including Open Author to put together different media, and the Module Builder.
This free online class from Peer 2 Peer University takes you through the process of finding, remixing and creating OERs.
An update to the BCcampus Open Education Authoring Guide, this guide covers how to write and self-publish an open textbook. Includes preparing, planning, writing, publishing, and maintaining an open textbook.
This short read provides best practices for making OERs accessible.
Find other OER authors in this online community for support and possible partners.
This open books provides help on editing and adapting existing open textbooks for your own use.
This toolkit helps OER authors make their works accessible for all.
More and more open textbooks are being created using the Pressbooks software. This guides you through the process of cloning a Pressbook so you can adapt it as needed.
This open book helps professors see how they can include students in the process of creating an open textbook.
While many people equate open educational resources with "free to use," there's a second component that's just as important: licensed for reuse. Most OERs enjoy automatic copyright protection, meaning their creators have sole authority to make copies, distribute and adapt their work.
By adding a reuse license to OERs, authors can ensure other teachers can easily use their OERs and adapt them for their own needs. One of the easiest ways to do this is through a Creative Commons license.
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit group that created a series of six licenses that allow copyright owners to pick and choose which rights they want to grant to the public in their works. Creative Commons licenses work with copyright law and actually give copyright owners certain protections - the right to attribution - that copyright law generally does not.
Although each Creative Commons license includes legal language behind it, they're also represented by easy-to-read icons that include a mix of these symbols:
BY - Anyone who uses your work must give you attribution in the way you request but not in such a way to suggest endorsement.
NC - People are allowed to copy, distribute, display, perform, and modify your work in any way except for commercial profit.
SA - People are allowed to copy, distribute, display, perform, and modify your work so long as they distribute any modified work on the same terms you've licensed your work under.
ND - People are allowed to copy, distribute, display, and perform your work but are not allowed to modify it.
Create your own Creative Commons license using a mix of these icons. Although you can use any of the six possible Creative Commons licenses that include a mix of these elements, understand that using the no derivatives requirement will block other teachers from adapting your material to their own needs. If you're creating an item in Google Doc, you can use this add on tool to easily include a Creative Commons license within the document.
Information adapted from Creative Commons.
University of Nevada, Reno Scholarly Communication and Open Access Guide by Teresa Auch Schultz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.