An Introduction to OER for Langara Instructors

Created Feb. 7, 2024 by Briana Fraser

Typically, most instructors begin their quest for an open textbook or other other open resources by searching the many established open textbook and OER collections available. A number of these OER repositories are listed below.

In this lesson, we will introduce a number of OER repositories and demonstrate how to locate videos and images with Creative Commons licenses.

Textbooks

An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open copyright license and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers, and members of the public. They are available for free as online versions, and as low-cost printed versions, should students or faculty opt for these. Open textbooks are a way to significantly reduce student textbook costs while giving instructors the flexibility to reformat and customize their course material. They are an affordable, flexible alternative to traditionally-published textbooks.

These open textbook repositories are a great starting point for locating high quality open textbooks.

 BC Campus Open Textbooks This curated collection aligns with the top 40 subject areas in BC.
Many of these textbooks have been reviewed and vetted by BC post-secondary faculty.
Some open textbooks contain supplemental or ancillary materials (e.g., test banks, quizzes, PowerPoint slides, videos).

Open Stax OpenStax was founded in 1999 by Richard Baraniuk, an electrical engineering professor at Rice University.
Originally named Connexions, OpenStax started as an Open Educational Resource (OER) repository where faculty around the world could publish, share, and remix educational materials.
 Open Textbook Library  The Open Textbook Network (OTN) helps higher education institutions and systems advance the use of open textbooks and practices on their campuses.

All of Open Textbook Library textbooks are free, openly licensed, and complete.

Other ways to find open textbooks or other OER include:

  1. Connect with your library
  2. Ask your colleagues what OER they use
  3. Conduct an advanced Google search: https://www.google.ca/advanced_search
  4. Get your students to find open resources, have them do a content review, and post the results to your course website or Learning Management System (LMS)

Videos

There are numerous openly available videos in various disciplines and we want to help you locate them. We have identified the sites that provide high quality open videos and they have been broken down to help you choose those that best fit your needs.

YouTube

YouTube provides millions of Creative Commons-licensed videos (among their billions of video collections). The key is filtering them to isolate the Creative Commons-licensed ones.

We have created the following video to demonstrate how to locate Creative Commons licensed videos on YouTube.

Finding CC-Licensed Videos on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65JrKphjyII
Finding CC Licensed Videos on YouTube by Briana Fraser, CC BY

Vimeo

Like YouTube, Vimeo hosts millions of Creative Commons-licensed videos. In addition, Vimeo provides a separate Creative Commons licensed video collection which makes the filtering process much easier.

The following video shows you how to search Vimeo for videos with Creative Commons licenses.


Finding CC-Licensed Videos on Vimeo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orDPKZiCyVI&t=1s
Finding CC Licensed Videos on Vimeo by Briana Fraser, CC BY

TED

TED provides over 1700 inspiring talks. Past presenters include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, Bono, Google founders 
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners. 

TED Videos are not officially licensed with any kind of open licensing. However, TED allows the users to freely view and download the videos without restraint. The website is provided as a public service to promote the spread of good ideas. Even though the website is provided as a public service and TED has not clarified how they wish to be cited, it is still a good practice to provide a proper attribution when adopting a video from TED.


Images

With the large number of  open images available you should have them at your fingertips! We have identified the places that provide quality open images and we’ve broken them down to help you choose those that best fit your needs.

Flickr

Flickr hosts millions of Creative Commons-licensed images. Notably, Flickr provides a separate Creative Commons licensed videos collection

We created the following video to demonstrate searching Flickr's Creative Commons image collection.

Finding CC-Licensed Images on Flickr

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNaXvfwCnZI&t=1s
Find CC Licensed Images on Flickr by Briana Fraser, CC BY

Wikimedia

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository that is completely dedicated to providing educational media that are released either in the public domain or under Creative Commons license.

Course Materials

There are countless openly available course materials in a variety of disciplines if you know where to locate them. The following sites provide high quality open course materials, such as assessments, syllabi, readings, and lectures. These resources have been assembled to help you choose what best fit your needs.

 MIT OpenCourseware
  • MIT OpenCourseware features the materials from 2,015 MIT courses.
  • Many courses provide video lectures and actual recordings of MIT classrooms.
  • The lecture videos are downloadable and streamable, and provided with lecture slides used in the recording.
  • Full course packages are provided including syllabus, readings and assignments.
 
 MERLOT II  
  • The MERLOT collection is made up of over 40,000 materials in 19 different material type categories and growing.
  • MERLOT materials are submitted by members of the MERLOT community. Basically, anyone can submit materials to MERLOT, but it has to go through a thorough peer review process.
  • MERLOT does not actually store the materials. They maintain the metadata records for each piece of material in the collection and a link to its own website.
Open Yale Courses  
  • Open Yale Courses features the video lectures of 42 renowned courses that are being taught at Yale.
  • Each course includes a full set of video lectures accompanied by other course materials such as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets.
  • The lecture videos are downloadable and streamable, and an audio-only version is also offered.
  • Searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.
  • The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.
 OER Commons  
  • OER Commons has forged alliances with over 500 major content partners. Users can search across over 42,000 vetted and fully-indexed OER ensuring a high level of resource relevancy and discovery.
  • It provides an online authoring tool that allows you to compose, edit, and publish your work under an open license.
  • You can create a “My OER” account page where you can organize the items you’ve submitted, evaluated, or authored.
 Learningpod  
  • Learningpod is an online library of practice and assessment questions.
  • They offer some of the best questions from publishers like Kaplan and open education partners like Open Course Library and OpenStax College, and then give teachers the ability to mix and match to create their own sets (they call them “pods”).
  • Using their tools teachers can easily print, share via email or social links, or even embed quizzes or assignments on a webpage.
 UC Davis LibreTexts  
  • LibreTexts is a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve postsecondary education at all levels of higher learning. 
  • The LibreTexts approach is highly collaborative where an Open Access textbook environment is under constant revision by students, faculty, and outside experts to supplant conventional paper-based books.
  • Disciplines include: Chemistry, Biology, Geology, Math, Stats, Physics, Social Sciences, and Engineering
 Saylor.org  
  • Saylor.org provides perfectly unified 317 courses with proven quality.
  • Saylor displays and organizes the courses based on the scope and level.
  • They also adopted about 100 open textbooks and provide them via their Bookshelf. They are well organized and easy to download.


Activity

Experience:

  • Review the criteria available from MERLOT’s Peer Review process.
    https://www.oercommons.org/authoring/edit/17972
  • Search for content in your teaching discipline at:
     OER Commons (https://oercommons.org),
    MIT OpenCourseware (https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm)
    and MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm) 

Review Questions:

  1. How can you find open textbooks?
  2. Where can you find videos with Creative Commons licenses?
  3. Where can you find images in the public domain?

Resources:


  Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Locating OER contains material from: Open Textbook Directory, by BCCampus, used under CC-BY 4.0 International license; Videos, by Open Washington, used under CC-BY 4.0; Vimeo, by Open Washington, used under CC-BY 4.0; YouTube, by Open Washington, used under CC-BY 4.0; Image Resources, by Open Washington, used under CC-BY 4.0; Flickr, by Open Washington, used under CC-BY 4.0; MIT Open Courseware, by Open Washington, used under CC-BY 4.0; Open Yale Courses, by Open Washington, used under CC-BY 4.0; Merlot, by Open Washington, used under CC-BY 4.0; OER Commons, by Open Washington, used under CC-BY 4.0; Learningpod, by Open Washington, used under CC-BY 4.0; Saylor Academy, by Open Washington, used under CC-BY 4.0; Chemistry LibreTexts, by Delmar Larsen, used under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, and and Introduction to Open Educational Resources, by Judy Baker, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.


 




Return to top