Unlike creating traditional educational materials, creating an Open Educational Resource is a different process. When you author/co-author an OER, you will be sharing your knowledge freely and openly to a global community. In this context, an OER becomes a community property, which can be used and changed to meet a specific need. To be considered an OER, a work should be shared in an editable format, allowing others to make changes and/or add to it in the form of an adaptation.
The general steps that you should consider when creating your own OER include:
Text adapted from Not Just Another Textbook by Lauri Aesoph, which is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International License.
It is highly recommended to consult the below regarding self-publishing and authoring open textbooks:
Self-Publishing Guide | BCcampus OpenEd
Authoring Open Textbooks | Open Textbook Network
Video "Creating Open Educational Resources" by Abbey Elder is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International license.
Platforms & Tools:
Pressbooks "Easily create e-books, typeset PDFs, and web books. Choose from professionally designed book themes. One button publishing." Free and priced options.
OER Commons - Links to the authoring platform from OER Commons. Use Module Builder to create interactive content or Open Author to create course materials using text, files, images, etc. You will be prompted to set up an account to use this platform.
InkScape
Open Source application that creates and edits PDFs and also is a vector drawing and graphics tool. A better option for PDF editing if your document is image-heavy.
LibreOCR
A LibreOffice extension that enables optical character recognition to turn unreadable PDFs into readable ones. This makes them accessible, and is also important because it allows searching.
LibreOffice
An Open Source office suite comparable to Microsoft Office. Document editing, spreadsheets, charts, presentations, small databases, images/PDFs, a mathematical formula editor, etc.
LibreOffice Draw
Open Source application that creates and edits PDF documents
Softchalk | Resource/help page Can be used to create interactive tutorials and mash up text/media.
Google Drive | Google Drive Help Drive allows you to create web-hosted documents, presentations, forms etc. Each document can be linked to from D2L and centrally maintained (i.e. you can update the google document and it will automatically update within D2L). This can be useful especially if you are using the same material for multiple classes.
Video Editing & Storage
Screencast-o-matic | Tutorials Easily record and edit videos of action on your computer screen.
Photo Editing
Pixlr | Tutorials & FAQ Online photo editor and drawing tool. Requires Flash
