Open Education Services

Open Education Services provides resources and support for instructors seeking to adopt or create Open Educational Resources (OER) for their courses. OERs are learning objects that come with open licenses and allow instructors to customize the content to best fit their course and pedagogical needs. They are generally free of cost for students to access. OERs may be textbooks, full courses, lesson plans, videos, tests, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports access to knowledge. 

Our goal is to support instructors influencing student success in two ways, by:

  1. Mitigating the financial barriers that many students face in accessing and continuing higher education by increasing the adoption rate of free or low-cost course materials. 
  2. Supporting innovative teaching through the use of OER and other open practices, which allow instructors to design materials that achieve their course objectives and engage students actively in the creation of scholarship in new ways. 

Consultations available for

Locating OER and Other Free Course Materials

We help instructors locate existing OER relevant to courses and/or assignments. OER might include textbooks, images, multimedia, and other learning objects. If OER is not an immediate fit, we can help find other low-cost or no-cost resources. This may include finding digital content already licensed by the Libraries.

Creating or Adapting OER

If instructors want to author their own OER or adapt existing OER to create a new version, we consult to identify the publishing platforms or tools that best meet their needs and select and apply appropriate open licenses for new content. We can also provide guidance on OER repositories to which new or adapted OER could be submitted for discovery.

Open Pedagogy

We work with instructors to revise existing assignments or introduce new assignments that leverage open pedagogy and/or produce OER, involving students in the process of scholarship creation.

Contact

Heather Walter

Tocker Open Education Librarian