The OER Community Course is designed to provide you with an opportunity to explore and discuss methods and approaches to finding, adopting, customizing, integrating, creating, publishing, and licensing OER. It also opens opportunities to connect in conversation with your peers and work with OER advocates from the SUNY community who can help you along your learning journey.

The full learning journey is made up of six courses that will guide you through:

• Understanding OER
• Identifying, Finding, and Adopting OER
• Customizing and Integrating OER
• Creating Licensing and Publishing OER
• Sharing and Promoting OER
• Open Pedagogy Master Class

Identifying, Finding, and Adopting OER

This course explores different types and formats of OER, and offer guidance on searching for OER, and adopting OER into your classes. You will learn how to search for OER, and plan for the use of OER in your classes.

Learning assets, activities, and community conversations will focus on:

• Differences between free-to-access, public domain, and open licensing;
• The range of OER types and formats;
• Ways to access OER search utilities and services;
• Places to find OER related to specific subjects or disciplines;
• Examples to guide the use of OER in your classes;
• Options you have for OER integration; and
• Methods for soliciting feedback on OER from your students.

Customizing and Integrating OER

This course works through the processes of customizing and integrating OER into your classes. You will learn about technical considerations for optimally editing and integrating OER into the learning management system, and/or other learning environments.

Learning assets, activities, and community conversations will focus on:

• The different features of OER editing platforms;
• Criteria for selecting the best platform for your editing and integrating OER;
• Ways of optimizing the dynamic nature of OER content for students;
• Integrating learning content that is not openly licensed alongside OER; and
• Technical options and protocols for integrating open content into learning management systems and other learning environments.

Creating, Licensing and Publishing OER

This course highlights the benefits of creating original content and openly licensing it for others to use. You will learn what you need to know and consider before creating a new OER from scratch, and what licenses you can choose from to apply to your work.

Learning assets, activities, and community conversations will focus on:

• How to create open educational materials that meet specific needs and are flexible enough to be useful for others;
• The difference between various open licenses;
• Methods for determining the appropriate open license for OER that you create;
• The analysis of open repositories and collections to determine the best venue for publishing materials; and
• Appropriate practices and procedures for publishing open educational materials.

Sharing and Promoting OER

This course explores ways to champion the positive impacts of OER — reduced costs of a college education, improved student success rates, and increased student retention. You will learn how to promote the many benefits OER offer to students, faculty, and institutions as a whole.

Learning assets, activities, and community conversations will focus on:

• Ways to motivate faculty to consider OER;
• Barriers that make it difficult for students, faculty, and institutions to adopt/adapt/create OER;
• Resources that address those barriers;
• Institutional goals and OER initiatives;
• Approaches to recognizing and rewarding other OER advocates; and
• How to measure and communicate out the success of OER initiatives.

Open Pedagogy Master Class

This course explores the concepts of open pedagogy, including the discovery of open pedagogy-enabled resources. You will learn how this teaching philosophy and open mindset enables students to create, curate and contribute to the learning environment.

Learning assets, activities, and community conversations will focus on:

• The relationship between what we know about effective teaching and learning and the additional capabilities afforded by OER;
• Ways to extend, revise, and remix pedagogy based on these additional capabilities;
• Ways to engage students in remixing activities;
• Activities and assignments that enable students to participate content development and revision; and
• Ideas and examples for student ownership of course content