OER Authoring Tools on OER Commons
Overview
This resource is part of the OERizona Advanced Coursework and supports OERizona faculty across Arizona in using tools to create OER.
Using the Open Author Tool on OER Commons
As faculty prepare to create OER, they should consider each of the following steps:
- Who is my audience and what are their needs?
- Does an OER for this topic already exist and can it be remixed?
- What is my timeline for creating this OER?
- Who can collaborate with me to support this OER Creation?
- What tool do I want to use to author the OER?
- What license do I plan to use?
- What do I need to get started?
When you consider question five from above, you may choose to use the Open Author tool on OER Commons. This tool was designed to help faculty organize their OER into sections that are easy to navigate, easy to remix and are accessibility compliant. Below are some key features of the Open Author Tool:
- Open Author allows you to organize your content into sections that can be navigated within a single resource or built into a full course shell.
- The authoring tool is designed with accessibility principles, so it includes an accessibility checker, requires Alt Text for images and uses Styles to create reading order for screenreaders.
- Open Author allows you to embed a variety of multi-media including videos, mathematical equations, images with Alt Text and tables.
- Resources authored on OER Commons get tagged with key metadata that makes it easy for other faculty to find and adopt your OER.
- Open Author supports authors in selecting an Creative Commons license and includes that license on the description page of the resource.
- Any remixes that are made of a resource authored on OER Commons will generate an email to the original author notifying them that a remix was made of their resource.
See the next section for a demonstration of using Open Author.