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Open Educational Resources (OER)

This guide provides information and resources to help support you learn about OER, find and evaluate existing OER, adopt OER, and create OER projects.

Adapt and Creating an OER: Getting Started

Copyright and Open Licensing

OER and Accessiblity

Tools for OER Projects Supported at UCalgary

About

Open Education Alberta is a publishing service offered by post-secondary institutions across Alberta who have partnered together. Open Education Alberta is based in the Pressbooks Create platform and can be used for the development and publication of open textbooks, toolkits, tutorials, and more. It offers a variety of plug-in options, multimedia integration, and more to create interactive and engaging publications.

Open Education Alberta (Pressbooks) is supported by Libraries and Cultural Resources at UCalgary.

About

PRISM is a digital archive of the University of Calgary's intellectual output. Established and maintained by Libraries and Cultural Resources to manage, preserve and make available the academic works of faculty, students and research groups. The collection includes faculty publications, masters and doctoral theses, and research output from across Southern Alberta (taken from PRISM Library Guide).

PRISM is supported by Libraries and Cultural Resources at UCalgary.

About

Libraries and Cultural Resources supports open access and subscription-based journals through our journal hosting service. We provide web hosting for journals through the Open Journal Systems (OJS), developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). This service is open to any open access peer-reviewed journals whose editor(s)-in-chief is affiliated with a Canadian post-secondary institution (Taken from the Scholarly Journal Publishing Library Guide).

OJS is supported by Libraries and Cultural Resources at UCalgary.

About

Omeka S is a simple web publishing system that is used by hundreds of archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, and individual researchers and teachers to create searchable websites for digital collections. 

At the University of Calgary, we are using Omeka S to allow students and faculty to tell stories about library or university collections, or academic works created by students themselves. Using Omeka S provides the opportunity for experiential learning beyond the classroom and the university community.

"Omeka" (pronounced oh-MEH-ka) is a Swahili word meaning "to display or lay out wares."

Omeka was developed by the Roy Rosezweig Center for History and New Media beginning in 2006.  Omeka is a non-profit project; its funding comes from a variety of US agencies and foundations. 

(Taken from the All About Omeka S page on the Digital Collection Projects Library Guide)

Omeka is supported by Libraries and Cultural Resources at UCalgary.

About

YuJa is the university’s video hosting/ content management system. It can be used as a stand-alone tool and also within your D2L course. YuJa allows you to upload and share your videos, create screen captures via a free desktop software and caption your content (Taken from the UCalgary eLearn Yuja page).

Yuja is supported by the Taylor Institute at UCalgary.

About

UCalgary Blogs is a collaborative publishing platform for use by the University of Calgary community, UCalgary Blogs is offered by the Taylor Institute Educational Development Unit as part of its efforts to extend effective blended and online learning on campus. You can create a personal blog, an official site, a course site, an ePortfolio, and more! (Adapted from the UCalgary Blogs Home Page)

UCalgary Blogs is supported by the Taylor Institute at UCalgary.

Have you adapted an existing OER or created a new OER? Let us know!

Have you adapted an existing open educational resources or created a new OER?

If so, we encourage you to share it with us to learn more about the work you are doing around OER adaptation and creation on our campus.

Please fill out the Open Educational Resource Adoption and Creation Self-Reporting Form.

Opening Up Your Teaching Materials


Are you interested in adapting your own teaching material and sharing it as an OER?  Some things to consider first may include (but are not limited to):

  • The repository that will host your learning object, such as a general or discipline-specific repository
    • UCalgary has it's own digital repository PRISM where academic and learning materials can be submitted.
  • The requirements of the chosen repository, including the format and metadata required for your learning object.
  • Evaluate your potential OER and think about:
    • Who is the intended audience?
    • Does your resource need updating or additional documentation for others to use effectively?
    • Are there any barriers to using and sharing the resource openly?
  • Ensure all CC-licensed resources within your learning object have appropriate attribution.
  • Develop metadata for your resource to increase findability
  • Select a license that's right for you! But note that your chosen repository may have certain requirements for Creative Commons licensing.

Need some guidance? Contact oer@ucalgary.ca for assistance, we'd be happy to help!


Material in this guide has been adapted from "Adapt/Remix OER" by Illinois University Library, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.