13. Adopting Guide
Chapter Subtopics
How to ADOPT an OER
When an instructor adopts an OER, they use an OER as-is in their course to replace high-cost materials. If there are high quality, vetted Open Educational Resources available on the topic your course covers, and you do not feel the need to edit or otherwise alter them for use in your course, you might consider adopting them for use “as is.” Adopting an OER means that an instructor is integrating Open Educational Materials into their courses without significant revisions, similar to adopting and integrating any new textbook into an existing course. The difference here is that when adopting OER, there is no publisher support.
The work of adopting OER includes creating or finding supplementary and ancillary materials for students. There are many resources online you can adopt and adapt, but this is added onto the work of finding and evaluating an OER textbook for a course.
Adopting is the simplest way of including OER in your course, and the least time intensive. If you are an instructor looking for an open textbook to assign to your class, here are some suggested ways to go about using a textbook from an open repository. Open textbooks are not geographically limited. Anyone from the United States or any other country in the world can use these resources.
Find
Look to see if someone published an OER for your course. If not, look for OERs that you can remix or combine into a new OER. Use the course learning objectives to help focus your search and choose OERs.
- Try many different sites and many different keywords and strategies
- Keep track of sites you’ve searched and keywords you’ve used
- Ask other OER adopters in your discipline what materials they use
Visit Finding OER Resources and Materials chapter of this guide.
Review and Evaluate
After you found an OER, use evaluation methods and rubrics to assess the quality, content, and curricular alignment.
Quality
- Peer review available
- Reputation of author and/or institution
- Pedagogy
- Clear visuals, high production value
Appropriateness
- Accuracy of content
- Alignment with course objective or learning outcome
- Appropriate reading level (see https://readable.io/text/)
- Licensing is appropriate for use (Creative Commons, Public Domain, or Fair Use determination)
Visit Evaluating Open Resources to see if it matches your criteria and based on content, presentation, online accessibility, production options, platform compatibility, delivery options, interactivity, consistency between online and printed versions, and available ancillary material (test banks, PowerPoints, etc.)
Use
When you have adopted or adapted an OER it should go through an evaluation process before use by students. Decide if you want to use as is or modify it. One of the benefits of open textbooks is flexibility to modify and customize them for specific course designs as much or as little as you desire. If you want to make edits or append content, make sure the Creative Commons license allows for that (every CC license except the non-derivative license allows for modifications).
Distribute to your students. There are a number of ways in which you can do this.
- If you’re using a textbook from this site, provide the link to the textbook to your students. They can either select which file type they would like to download, or they can purchase a low-cost printed version from the BCcampus print-on-demand service.
- Alternatively, download copies of the book and put them on another site. Some examples of where book files can be added are:
- Your institutional LMS (learning management system). Load the book files into your Moodle, Desire2Learn, Blackboard, or Canvas site and make the books available to your students via the LMS.
- Use an online file-sharing service like Dropbox or Google Drive. Upload copies of the book files to Dropbox or Google Drive and send your students the link.
- If you have a faculty website, put copies of the files on that website and send students to your website to download your copy of the textbook.
Inform the bookstore or print shop on campus to see if print-on-demand copies of the book can be made available for students. Keep in mind that textbooks that have a specific non-commercial clause (CC BY-NC) cannot be sold with a markup or for profit. However, charging a modest cost-recovery fee for physical textbooks is legal.
Inform the college or university library. Ask if a hard copy of the assigned open textbook can be added as a reference to the library stacks.
Report open textbook adoptions to your institution.
License and Attribution
- B.C. Open Textbook Adoption Guide by BCcampus and is used under a CC BY 4.0 International license.
- Adoption by Shannon Moist and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
- OER Finding and Adopting Guide for Instructors: Worksheet developed by Kate Cameron, Kirkwood Community College. Updated May 28, 2015 and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
- OER Basics Library Guide from Kirkland Library is used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
- The OER libguide by PGCC Library is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. It is attributed to UMGC, Butler County Community College, D’Arcy Hutchings and the original versions can be found at UMGC, BCCC, and Hutchings.
