Using Open Educational Resources in Practice

If you are involved in teaching, you can adopt Open Educational Resources (OER) from others and use them in your courses, for example open textbooks. In this way, you also help students to save money and effort on buying or borrowing textbooks. You can also use other open educational materials from others to enrich your courses, such as slides, course materials and videos.

See how to find OER in this entry.

If you have found an Open Educational Resource that you would like to re-use, you can do this in two ways:

  • Adopt: Use open educational materials, for example open textbooks, in your course.
  • Customise: You can revise, modify, change or adapt them. This also applies to open textbooks if, for example, they are available under less restrictive Creative Commons licences. Then, the author does not need to be asked for permission.

You can find out how to correctly label re-used OER with the TULLU rule.

OER also invite collaboration with others, for example between teachers and students. You can find suggestions for this on the pages Collaborating and Teaching under the keyword Open Pedagogy of the Learning Portal of College Libraries Ontario.