Creating Open Educational Resources

While your primary motivation for creating OER will likely be for use in your class, does the reach of your resource stop there? The open license makes these resources ideal for sharing with teachers and learners beyond VCU. 

Benefits of sharing your OER:

• Adopters can share feedback which will improve the resource. This makes a better resource for you, your students, and all who use it!
• Others can (help) create new, updated editions of the OER, especially if you find yourself in a position where you're no longer able to do so. The OER can live on and be current without your constant attention.
• Students, whether in your class or not, can utilize the OER as a reference or resource for lifelong learning.
• Add to the shared knowledge and available resources. Sharing your OER means that someone else won't have to recreate a very similar resource from scratch. 
• Increase your visibility within your professional community. This can not only translate to increased name recognition but potentially increased opportunities based on your contribution.
• Increase VCU's and/or your program's visibility. This is one way to increase national prominence, which is a part of the VCU Quest 2025 Strategic Plan.

Before sharing your OER, consider: 

• Does the OER contain clear licensing and authorship information?
• Is the OER in a polished condition (e.g. no grammatical spelling errors, formatted)? If you're looking for feedback on a draft, it might not need to be polished, but it's always good to put your best foot forward when sharing your work.
• Does the OER meet accessibility standards?
• Is the OER in a format that allows for easy reuse and/or customization by others? While not all OER will lend themselves to option, if you can provide an easily editable format (e.g. Word instead of PDF), you should consider doing so.
• Is the OER hyper-customized to the VCU community? Creating a modular design where customization can be easily identified and switched might be a good option so that others can customize for their own institution.  You want to make widespread adoption as easy as possible.
• Does the OER need instructor guides on how to adopt or use the resource? Is this guidance easily discoverable (e.g. a part of the OER or linked to from the OER)?
• Do you want to track adoptions at other institutions? If so, is there a clear way to do this (e.g. adding a form to the front page)?

Before sharing, you might also want to consider gathering feedback on your resource. For more information of gathering feedback, visit:

Local Repositories

OER Repositories

Textbook-specific

All OER

Disciplinary Repositories

Some disciplines have repositories aimed specifically at sharing educational materials. Sharing on these websites is a great option as they are targeting directly at teachers in your discipline.

In addition to depositing copies of your OER into repositories, you can take other steps to promote the resource: 

• Share a link to the resource (perhaps in the repository) with colleagues
• Promote via disciplinary listservs
• Present on your experiences and/or impact of the resource at disciplinary conferences
• Publish on your experiences and/or impact of the resource

The Open Educational Resources Librarian also has access to OER specific-listservs which can be used to promote your OER. If you forward relevant information about your OER, we can share via these listservs which reach librarians, faculty, and others interested in OER.