Open Course Materials Matching Service (OCoMMS)
Are you interested in adopting Open Educational Resources into your course, but haven't found the time to look?
Use the Open Course Materials Matching Service to save time and effort searching for Open Educational Resources (OER) for your course as we will do the searching for you!
The Open Course Materials Matching Service (OCoMMS) is a service provided at Library and Cultural Resources (LCR) to support faculty with incorporating Open Educational Resources into their course materials. OCoMMS utilizes a course's syllabus outlines, reading list, and additional information you provide to help guide the search by the OCoMMS Support Team for potential Open Educational Resources that match the needs and learning objectives of your course. Following a search, you will be provided with a curated list of OERs for you to review and evaluate as the subject expert for potential OERs to adopt into your course. If adopted, your chosen OER can either replace existing course materials or be added as an additional resource for your students.
This service is available to all faculty, course coordinators,and other teaching staff for any course of any class size, but we especially encourage those teaching first and second year, large enrolment, and required courses to request the Open Course Materials Matching Service and learn about potential OER relevant to your course.
If a course is brand new and does not have a syllabus yet, the OCoMMS Support Team can work with those developing the course to find open educational resources (OER) that match their needs as well.
If you have questions about the Open Course Materials Matching Service, contact oer@ucalgary.ca.
What are Open Educational Resources?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others (UNESCO, 2021).
There are many benefits to teaching with OER including reducing cost barriers for students, 24/7 and immediate access, flexible learning opportunities, increased student engagement, the opportunity to customize teaching materials to better suit your course, and many more.
View our Open Educational Resources Guide to learn more about OER and resources for their adoption and evaluation.
History of the Open Course Materials Matching Service (OCoMMS)
Open Course Materials Matching Service (OCoMMS) is the continuation of the previous OER matching service pilot offered by Libraries and Cultural Resources in Summer 2021 through the generous support of the UCalgary Students’ Union (SU). The SU has provided Quality Money funding for an Open Education & OER Student Librarian summer position who assists with this service during the summer months.
Thanks to this funding and support from the SU, we have expanded this pilot into an ongoing service LCR offers. Open Course Materials Matching Services or OCoMMS is now available for all instructors, faculty, course coordinators, and other UCalgary community member who are interested in adopting Open Educational Resources into their courses.
Benefits of the Open Course Materials Matching Service (OCoMMS)?
There are many reasons to consider using the Open Course Materials Matching Service and adopting OER in your course. One major reason for using OCoMMS is to save you time and effort for searching and finding Open Educational Resources that match the needs of your course.
Research in Open Educational Resources has shown that the greatest barriers for instructors and faculty in adopting OER is the time and effort needed to search for OER that fit the needs of their course. A third potential barrier instructors may encounter is that while OER is available across a wide variety of subject areas, some subjects are better represented than others as some disciplines may have more creators of OER than others. However, new OER are being created all the time. OCoMMS is available for both shorter-term and longer-term search requests for finding matching OER when relevant course materials are not found in the initial search.
Open Educational Resources: Benefits and Challenges
Benefits of OER
- 24/7 access
- Immediate access
- Cost savings to students, instructors, faculty, and departments
- Integrate local context and information
- Information may be more current as research and information can be updated at any time
- Improve representation relating to diversity and student voices
- Engage students as creators of knowledge through OER co-creation projects
- And many more
Challenges of OER
- Time and effort spent searching
- Multiple repositories to search in (no one place to search for OER)
- Some subjects have more OER created for them than others, depending on the disciplines of the creators currently working in the OER community
- Locating high-quality OER (we have evaluating tools to help with this)
This Open Course Materials Matching Service (OCoMMS) Guide by Sarah Adams is licensed under aCreative Common Attribution 4.0 International License.