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Open Educational Resources (OER) for Educators

Adopt and adapt resources published with an open licence to enhance your teaching and increase student access to materials

How to use OER in your teaching

You can adopt existing materials as they are, adapt them to better meet your needs, or create your own OER. Here are some ways to use OER in your teaching with examples of how educators around the world have incorporated OER into their teaching.

Adopting OER

What this might look like Case Studies
Start small - next time you're looking for an example to help students better understand concepts, use an openly licensed image or video

Hear Everett Community College Professor Robin Araniva talk about how they enhanced the classroom experience with relevant, local, open resources to supplement their Environmental Science and Marine Science course material. 
Switch to an OER textbook

La Trobe's Assoc. Prof. Tanya Sherry adopted an open textbook to resolve student access issues in her first-year education unit and Dr David Walker adopted an open textbook to modernise pedagogy in his first-year economics unit. 
Add to your reading list  As part of the CAUL OER Collective, lots of Australian/New Zealand academics have been authoring their own textbooks which are openly licensed for re-use by others. 

Adapting OER

What this might look like Case Studies

If an open resource meets most of your criteria, consider whether you could edit, revise or place content to improve its quality and usefulness
Embrace open educational practices and involved your students in the evaluation, editing and creation of OERs

Creating your own OER

What this might look like Case Studies

Can't find an OER on your topic? Consider creating your own

 Western Sydney University's Dr Jess Richards found that the current textbook for her Sports Marketing unit was expensive, didn't capture the Australian experience and overlooked the changing landscape for women and minorities in sport. So she created an open textbook, Sports Marketing: An Australian Perspective https://doi.org/10.26183/yy8m-px66. Watch Dr Richards talk about her experience and the positive response from her students. 

Engage your students in the development and use of OER, sharing a range of materials and knowledge, and integrating openness throughout the classroom

 Published on Pressbooks by Charles Darwin University, OER ebook Cultural Knowledges and Work Integrated Learning is an “iteratively compiled” collection of students’ case studies on cultural capability.

 

CONTENT LICENCE

 Except for logos, Canva designs or where otherwise indicated, content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.