Transforming your course to include OER can be as simple as switching one material for another or as radical as completely changing your teaching style. This chapter outlines some key considerations and questions you should ask yourself before adopting or creating OER.^[1]

How will using OER improve your course?

When integrating OER into your course, you have the opportunity to critically evaluate your teaching methods and alter them to better meet your needs. Open education is a movement that supports innovative teaching. By using OER in a course, you are opening up new possibilities for greater diversification, multidisciplinary learning, and student engagement.

One way to go about this is to use backward design for your project.

Backward design is a framework for planning your course around its intended outcomes.^[2] Backwards design is a way to solidify more abstract course outcomes such as critical and creative thinking, in order to ensure that students are actively engaged with the material they are being taught. There are three stages to the backward design process:

1. Identify desired results,
2. Determine acceptable evidence, and
3. Plan learning experiences and instruction.^[3]

You might notice that this approach does not end with “create and/or curate educational content.” Instead, it ends with more planning. The purpose of backward design is not to be done with your course transformation in a quick 3-step process. Instead, it asks instructors to question the processes and materials they currently use and to start over by plotting out what is needed to meet your course outcomes.

Thinking critically about the purpose of your course and the learning outcomes you want your students to meet is one way to ensure that you provide an excellent learning experience for your students.

Who is your audience?

Once you’ve decided that you’re ready to use OER in your course, it’s important to consider your target audience(s).

Although your OER may be used by educators around the world, you can create it with your local audience in mind. Often times, culturally relevant examples allow students to engage with work on a more personal level. Although perfectly ‘open’ resources would not include culturally specific examples, jargon, or humour, the ability to alter OER allows for adaptation to fit new audiences, without sacrificing engagement for the original target audience. ^[4]

Does the OER you need already exist?

It is generally a good idea to look around at what content is available for your course before creating something new. There are three reasons for this:

1. The OER you want to create/use may already exist in the format you want.
2. You may be able to remix an existing OER in order to meet your course needs.
3. Your own teaching materials could be adapted for use as OER. For example, lecture notes can be an invaluable teaching aid for courses with no excellent textbooks available. Consider asking students who have taken the course what they feel are the most useful resources for the course.

How will you share your course OER?

Whether you are using an OER as-is or creating something from scratch, one of the first considerations you should take into account is how you will share the resource(s).

What expertise is required to use or create OER?

Creating an OER can be a considerable amount of work, especially if you’re starting from scratch. It’s important to consider all aspects for your project including instructional design, technology, and graphics before you jump in.

Integrating an existing OER into your curriculum doesn’t need to be a one-man job. Instructional designers and librarians can provide guidance to help you incorporate open resources into your course. At University of Alberta, you can get support creating OER from the Centre for Teaching and Learning or Libraries. At other universities, you may have more or less support available. Please reach out to your library or another office on campus that manages OER support to learn more.

Could your OER be easily reused or repurposed?

One of the primary benefits of OER is that they are reusable. When adopting an existing OER, you’ll want to choose one that isn’t so specific that it can’t be adapted to your needs. Similarly, if you create your own OER, making it easy to adapt will broaden its use among other instructors.

This chapter outlined some considerations to keep in mind when transforming your course to use OER. One aspect of OER not covered here, however, is how to make an OER “open” and what that means. To answer that question, in the next chapter we’ll discuss the role that copyright plays in an OER’s development and dissemination.