AggieOpen: Supporting OER Adoption & Creation

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.

Our goals are to: 

• Promote the creation, adaptation, adoption, and curation of openly licensed materials by our instructors and students.
• Provide support for instructors to incorporate openly licensed educational resources into their curriculum.
• Improve availability and affordability of course materials.

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.

The UC Davis Library can help instructors:

• Find free, openly licensed course materials including textbooks, streaming media, assessment tools, and dynamic content.
• Author openly licensed course materials and textbooks using Creative Commons licenses.
• Foster student engagement in creating openly licensed educational resources.

Request a consultation

Email aggieopen@ucdavis.edu with questions about OER or to schedule a consultation related to using or creating openly licensed course materials.

OER Discovery Workshop – Thursday, May 5 @ 12:00pm – 12:45pm (online)

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!

Registration: join us online via Zoom

AggieOpen Fellows initiative to launch in 2022-2023

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:

• existing scholarly resources such as articles, books, video tutorials, or conference papers that are freely available through open access publishing;
• digitized primary source materials such as manuscripts, photographs, books, video, sheet music, audio recordings, maps, or artwork;
• simulations, visualizations, and virtual labs.

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.).

What are Open Educational Resources?

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.

Why should I use OER?

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.

Open Educational Resources:

• Reduce education costs by providing course content that is freely accessible to students on day one of class.
• Enable customization of course materials by revising openly licensed content to better align with learning objectives or to provide more culturally relevant curriculum.
• Reduce faculty preparation time by using openly licensed ancillary materials including assignments, quiz banks, and homework platforms.
• Facilitate collaboration by working with students to create your own open educational resources.