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This Library Guide was created to help Brooklyn College faculty create Open Educational Resources (OER) for Brooklyn College students and beyond

Quick OER Guide | OER Created by Brooklyn Faculty | Brooklyn College Library

Faculty Guide on Open Education Resources (OER): Getting Started

Learn to create OER

Purpose of Guide

This guide was created to help in the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). This guide provides best practices on designing and producing OERs, instructions on creating accessible OERs for all users, information on finding OER resources to use, reuse, remix, adapt and modify, and material on the pedagogy of OER.

OER Technologists

Meet the Brooklyn College OER Developer Team.  Each member is here to help you create your OER.  Please feel free to reach out to any or all of us. 

Profile image used to represent Amy Wolfe, accessibility librarian, and assistant professor oer developer.

Amy Wolfe is an Open Educational Resources Developer, Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College and Accessibility Librarian for the CUNY Office of Library Services. She holds a Master's in Liberal Studies - Digital Humanities from the CUNY Graduate Center and a Master's in Library Studies and a BA in History, Women's Studies & African-American Lit, from the UW-Madison.  Contact Amy for help with OER and accessibility.

wifi sign nature scene.

Colin McDonald is an Open Educational Resources Developer at Brooklyn College and Project Manager for the CUNY Academic Commons team at the Grad Center. He is an Economics and English graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's dual-degree program. You can reach him at colin.mcdonald@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

Image courtesy of Pexels.

Emily Fairey.

Emily Fairey is an Open Educational Resources Developer at Brooklyn College. She has a doctorate in Classics from CUNY Graduate Center (2006), and a Master's in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute (2011). She teaches Latin, Greek, and Classical Studies as well as creating Open Educational Resources. Please contact Emily if you have any OER questions. She can be reached at emily.fairey86@brooklyn.cuny.edu

5R, resuse, revise, remix, redistribute and retain.

Image: 5Rs by Erin Fields (CC-SA-3)

What differentiates OERs from other instructional resources is you're allowed to:

  1. Retain: Keep access to the materials after the learning event.
  2. Reuse: Use the content in its unaltered form.
  3. Revise: Adapt, adjust, modify, improve, or alter the content.
  4. Remix: Combine original or revised content with other OER to create something new.
  5. Redistribute: Share copies of original content, revisions or remixes with others.

Getting started creating an OER

So you want to create an Open Educational Resource (OER) but you don't know where to start.  No need to worry, we are here to help you.  The first step is to make an appointment with the new OER Coordinator Business Librarian Frans Albarillo, who is taking over for retired Associate Professor and Librarian Miriam Deutch, and an OER Developer. We'll walk through all the possibilities and help you create a wonderful OER. Bring your imagination and as much of the following to the meeting:

  1. Course syllabus
  2. Citations for materials you want to use
  • Cite: Citations for OER materials depend on the type of material being referenced. Use the Library's Citation Tools to quickly create citations based on a resources format.
  • Attribution: Refers to the crediting of work to the copyright holder and is a frequent requirement of OER licensed materials.
  • ​​Licensing: OERs often have an intellectual property license attached that specifies how OERs can be used.
  1. Electronic version of any documents to include (make pdfs accessible and scanned with optical character recognition)
  2. Electronic versions of images
  3. Lists to any sites you want included
  4. Links to any OER materials you have have already found or made which you want to re-use
  5. Check out the OER's created by Brooklyn College Faculty for inspiration.

Together with an OER Developer, you will then choose which OER platform to use to publish your OER. Once finished your OER will be deposited into the CUNY institutional repository, Academic Works and also OpenEd CUNY, the CUNY microsite on OER Commons.

Note:

  • Since we have to adhere to copyright and fair use, OERs have licenses attached specifying how they may be used, reused, modified, and distributed. We therefore will need full citations or attributions to all content to ensure we are adhering correctly.  If you don't have full citations, we can work with you to discover them.
  • All documents and files need to be checked for accessibility and made accessible. We can help you create accessible content and provide Instructions on creating accessible content.
  • Instructors need to provide Alternative text (alt-text) of images to be used (especially for Art courses).

Citation: [Abbey Elder] (2017, Dec. 13) An Introduction to Open Educational Resources [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/NtJmakm1-zc

OER in the world

International OER logoThe worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. This shift in educational practice is not just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensed content; it’s about participation and co-creation. OER offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning content through engaging educators in new participatory processes and effective technologies for engaging with learning. OER Commons

OER image By Stefflja (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are teaching, learning, and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OERs can be textbooks, full courses, lesson plans, videos, learning objects, tests, syllabi, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports access to knowledge. (Wiley, 2014)

Creative commons license logo CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Unless otherwise noted this site is licensed under (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Site design and formatting by Amy Wolfe, OER Developer (Brooklyn College) and Accessibility Librarian (CUNY Office of Library Services)..
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