To create Open Educational Resources (OER), you do not necessarily have to use different tools than you usually do. Often you can create Open Educational Resources with the tools you have used so far. Nevertheless, it may be worthwhile to use other tools. Especially if they were specifically designed for the creation of OER, they can facilitate aspects such as the openness and accessibility of OER.

When choosing an OER tool, you should consider the following criteria:

• What types of OER does it support (for example, text, multimedia or both combined together in course modules)?
• Do you need special characters or formulas for your resource and does the tool support this?
• Does the tool support creating content with open file formats?
• Does the tool allow you to easily integrate a (Creative Commons) licence and thus simplify sharing?
• Does the tool help you to save your OER on an existing OER platform with a permanent link for sharing?
• Can you export your content with the tool so that others can repurpose and share it?
• Do users have to create an account to use your OER? What are the terms of use and what happens to the user data?

Tools for OER can be found listed in this entry. You can find these and other tools in the tool collection of the Open Economics Guide.

You can find more tool collections for creating Open Education Resources here:

• OER tools at OERinfo (German)
• Creating OER – A Guide for Higher Education (German)
• OER Toolkit from College Libraries Ontario
• OER Toolkit Ontario Tech University
• OER Toolkit Conestoga Library Services

Tip: Please also bear in mind the general checklist for Open Science tools.