Sheena Campbell
Student Services Department
Student Services Librarian
530-752-3058
AggieOpen encourages instructors to use openly licensed alternatives to commercially available course materials, such as open access or Creative Commons licensed publications, resources in the public domain, as well as learning objects and texts that instructors create themselves while achieving their pedagogical objectives.
Library experts can assist instructors with the process of finding, evaluating, and using open education resources (OER).
We provide consultation for instructors developing strategies to identify OER that support their teaching style and course learning outcomes, as well as navigating copyright and open licensing.
We also host OER Discovery workshops where instructors can learn more about the spectrum of openly licensed learning materials and begin exploring available OER in their field.
Email aggieopen@ucdavis.edu with questions about OER or to schedule a consultation related to using or creating openly licensed course materials.
Open educational resources encompass many types of teaching materials, including textbooks, assessment tools, and digital media. This session will provide attendees with strategies for finding, revising, and using OER that align with their syllabi. Participants will explore and evaluate resources, and receive an introduction to Creative Commons licensing. No prior knowledge or experience with OER is necessary!
The AggieOpen Fellows initiative will invite instructors to apply for grant funding to adopt, adapt or create open educational resources (OER) for undergraduate courses.
Sponsored by the UC Davis Library and LibreTexts, these grants are intended to fund the work involved in identifying, revising, creating, using, and/or sharing OER as alternatives for required commercial textbooks.
Alternatives may include:
The financial awards are meant to offer an incentive for the time it will take instructors to identify new resources, adjust syllabi, and modify assignments and can also be used to cover any actual expenses incurred by the instructor (ex. closed captioning, translation, etc.).
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by their creator, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them.
OER are teaching resources that have an open copyright license (such as one from Creative Commons), or they are part of the public domain and have no copyright. Depending on the license used, OER can be freely accessed, used, revised, and shared.
One of the driving factors for the adoption of OER, such as open textbooks, is they are free. Resources that are free and immediately accessible to all students on their first day of class are essential to promoting educational equity, as well as promoting lifelong learning. But cost savings is not the only benefit of using OER.
Creative Commons licensing is also what allows instructors to directly edit, revise and adapt content to provide more culturally relevant, topical and dynamic content to their students. Using Creative Commons licensing also makes it easier to share learning materials amongst colleagues and engage students to participate in the content creation process.
This is a curated list that contains platforms, collections, and repositories that host openly licensed educational materials to help you to discover OER content.
A three-part training guide from the University of Hawaii designed to bring higher education instructors up to speed with Open Educational Resources (OER).
This starter kit from the University of Alberta has been created to provide instructors who are entirely new to Open Education with an introduction to the use and creation of open educational resources (OER).
This is a collection of readings on open education edited by Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, Professor David Wiley. It includes chapters on intellectual property, free software, open-source, open content, open textbooks, and research in open education.