Transforming your course to include OER can be as simple as switching one material for another or as radical as completely changing your teaching style. Here are some key considerations and questions you should ask yourself before adopting or creating OER.

Focus on your goals!

While we're focused on the materials used in teaching, it is a good idea to take a step back to look at what you want your students to learn. What are the goals and desired outcomes for your course?

When integrating OER into your course, you have the opportunity to critically evaluate your methods and alter them to better meet your needs. One way to go about this is to use backward design for your project. Though we cannot spend too much time on backward design, here are some things to consider when reflecting on your course syllabus:

- Learning outcomes
  - What are the learning goals of each lesson, and how do they fit into the course as a whole?
- Assessment
  - What assessments or tasks will students perform to demonstrate understanding?
- Learning resources
  - What materials and resources will support those learning outcomes?

Thinking critically about the purpose of your course and the learning outcomes you want your students to meet is one way to ensure that you have provided the necessary educational materials for your students to be successful.

For more on backward design, see: Bowen, Ryan S., (2017). Understanding by Design. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.

Find, adapt, and/or create content that fits your goals

One of the primary benefits of OER is that they are reusable and revisable. Traditional commercial textbooks have a set structure that often controls our course design. Because OER is more flexible, we can focus on our learning goals first and then find resources that support student learning in our course.

Using OER allows us to build a course that is focused on the following:

What students are expected to learn:
- We can customize course resources to align directly with our learning objectives.
How we want to teach the course:
- OER allows for more academic freedom because we are not tied to static content created by others. We can revise and adjust content to fit our unique needs.
What our students need to support their learning:
- We can add resources for topics that our students tend to find challenging.
- We can adapt the content to speak to our students' experiences and academic backgrounds.
- We can work with students to build resources to support their success.

When adopting an existing OER, you’ll want to choose one that isn’t so specific that it can’t be adapted to your needs. Similarly, if you create your own OER, making it easy to adapt will broaden its use among other instructors.

What expertise is needed to use or create OER?

This module outlines some considerations when transforming your course to use OER. However, one aspect of OER not covered here is how to make an OER “open” and what that means. In the next module, we’ll discuss copyright's role in an OER’s development and dissemination to answer that question.

Attribution

Adapted from ASCCC OERI — OER Basics by Rachel Arteaga and Suzanne Wakim is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.