Guides

These guides offer a variety of perspectives and instructions on creating OER. Some guide you through the process of adaptation, others guide you through the process of creating and publishing open textbooks, and one is about involving students in OER creation.

• Adaptation Guide (BCcampus Open Education)
  This guide “is a practical reference about how to customize — or adapt — an open textbook so that it better fits your needs in the classroom and elsewhere. This guide defines the term adaptation and discusses reasons for revising a book, why this is possible with an open textbook, and the challenges involved.”
• Authoring Open Textbooks
  This guide from the Open Education Network “is for faculty authors, librarians, project managers and others who are involved in the production of open textbooks in higher education and K-12. Content includes a checklist for getting started, publishing program case studies, textbook organization and elements, writing resources and an overview of useful tools.”
• A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students
  This handbook from Rebus Community is “for faculty interested in practicing open pedagogy by involving students in the making of open textbooks, ancillary materials, or other Open Educational Resources.”
• Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know
  This guide from the Open Education Network is “for faculty, and those who support faculty, who want to modify an open textbook. Step-by-step instructions for importing and editing common open textbook file and platform types are included.”
• The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far)
  Rebus Community supports the creation of open textbooks and other open educational resources. This guide is Rebus’s “living repository of collective knowledge, written to equip all those who want to publish open textbooks with the resources they need.” The guide is “a book-in-progress,” and the web version will be updated throughout 2022, with updates made to other formats after the revisions are complete.
• Self-Publishing Guide (BCcampus Open Education)
  This guide “is a reference for individuals or groups wanting to write and self-publish an open textbook. This guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook.”

Tools

In addition to the tools listed below, see OER Authoring Tools [Google Docs], a guide to different authoring tools compiled by Michele DeSilva, COCC and Amy Hofer, Open Oregon Educational Resources and Tools for Creating OER: Selecting Appropriate Technologies, which “is intended to provide the OER community with a summary of some currently available tools for creating open content.”

• CUNY Pressbooks
  Pressbooks is an authoring platform built on WordPress. CUNY Pressbooks allows you to create content once and then publish it in a variety of formats: on the web, as a PDF or EPUB, and as various editable files. Click on “Sign Up” and use your CUNY email to get started.
• H5P
  H5P enables you to create, share, and reuse interactive HTML5 content on your own website.
• Hypothesis
  Hypothesis is a freely accessible open source web annotation tool.
• Manifold @CUNY
  “Our Manifold instance serves as a free digital publishing platform for the entire CUNY community, where you can create and share your own scholarship, custom classroom versions of texts and textbooks that are openly licensed or in the public domain, Open Educational Resources (OER), [or] journals, or use Manifold Reading Groups to build your own course reader from materials already available on our instance of Manifold.”
• Open Author (OER Commons)
  “Open Author helps you build and publish Open Educational Resources for you and for the benefit of educators and learners everywhere.”
• TED-Ed Lesson builder
  Create lessons using TED Talks or YouTube videos.

Attribution

Open licenses such as Creative Commons (CC) licenses make OER possible, and all CC licenses require attribution. The following pages at the CC Wiki are a great place to start in learning how to give credit to other creators of OER and how to mark your own work. For more information, see our page on Creative Commons and CC licenses and our page on attribution.

• Best practices for attribution
  “You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution. Here are some good (and not so good) examples of attribution.”
• Marking your work with a CC license
  “You have chosen a CC license for your work. Now how do you go about letting the world know? Here are some examples of how to mark your work with the CC license.”

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.