OER Commons

OER Commons is an initiative from the Institute for Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). The goal is to grow a sustainable culture of sharing and continuous improvement among educators at all levels. OER Commons is a digital public library and collaboration platform that provides access to high-quality OER and collaboration around the adaptation, evaluation, and use of OER to address the needs of teachers and learners.

What is OER Commons? OER commons

  • A collaborate resource center
  • It is a search engine which is inclusive of other OER sites, such as OpenStax
  • It is a repository for storing an institution, group, or individual’s OER

Why would you need OER Commons? Using an open resource for your course reduces the cost of textbooks and other resources for students which has a direct effect on their ability to sustain and complete their education. When a resource is offered with an open Creative Commons license, it enables you to revise, reuse, and remix the educational material to suit your exact needs, and even add to it.

How are faculty using OER Commons? OER can take on many different forms, such as an electronic textbook, an lesson module, a document resource, or some form of multimedia. OER Commons enables you to locate resources that fulfill needs in your course you feel could be addressed without imposing more costs on students.

The OER Commons Recipe

What do you want to do?

I want to find an open textbook

  • Go to OpenStax (a collaborative resource center included in OER Commons).
  • Search for an open textbook in your subject area.
  • Review the open license requirements and begin using your open textbook.
  • Revel in the glow of students who appreciate the cost-savings associated with using an open textbook.

I want to search for general OER appropriate for my class

  1. Use the OER Commons search engine to search for OER related to your subject, level, and format.
  2. Locate a resource – it may appear in a wide variety of forms and formats.

I want to contribute an OER I created to OER Commons – you will need to ask a few questions first

  1. Does my institution already have a repository established to manage my OER?
  2. What policies and procedures have been created to manage your institution’s OER Commons repository?
  3. Identify resources to support the learning objectives.
  4. Think about the meta-record you are creating for your contribution- your institution may have already developed some keyword standards for you to use. This greatly aids the discovery process.
  5. Contribute!
  6. Check periodically to see comments and peer-reviews.
Considerations, or things to think about: When using any OER (or any resources) keep in mind the ethics of use, accessibility, and evaluation criteria. All are important in successfully using and creating OER.

From the teaching kitchen of Pat Erwin-Ploog, Sr. Lecturer, Asst. Dean of Library Services Granite State College (USNH), Lead Faculty for OER Integration

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The USNH Technology Cookbook by University System of New Hampshire is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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