Open Educational Resources: Creating OER

If you discover that the content you need doesn't already exist, you may be interested in creating your own OER. Adapted from COERLL's OER resources.

Interested in practicing open pedagogy by involving your students in the creation of OER? Check out A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students.

1. Design for openness. It is important to ensure you have permission to publish all of the content in your OER. If you use third-party content, make sure to address copyright in the following ways:
   1. Find openly-licensed content to re-mix with your materials. See Fondren's guides to Finding Creative Commons Content, Finding Images and Text in the Public Domain, and Finding and Using Images in Publications.
   2. Attribute all content properly. For Creative Commons-licensed content, see Fondren's guide to Citing Creative Commons Content or OpenAttribute.
   3. Using copyrighted material. If you plan to use copyrighted materials, document your reasons for using it under fair use or seek permission from the copyright holder.
2. Choose a license. We recommend that you assign a Creative Commons license to your content. You still hold the copyright, but the Creative Commons license provides the legal framework for you to choose how you share your materials. 
3. Publish. Make your materials available online at a publicly-available URL. Consider long-term access and preservation when choosing an online home for your OER. You might consider:
   1. Rice Research Repository. Rice's institutional repository is committed to long-term preservation and access of Rice scholarship. The repository is indexed by search engines such as Google and Google Scholar, increasing the discoverability/visibility of your work.
   2. OER Commons. Provides tools for creating and publishing OERs.

Interested in learning more about how you can find, adopt, or create open educational resources? Contact Fondren’s Digital Scholarship Services at cds@rice.edu