Delivering quality open education often involves the use of open educational resources (OER). The open nature of these resources mean there is great opportunity to adopt and re-use existing OER, or re-mix and adapt them to suit students' needs.
If you are looking to find already existing OER, please consult our dedicated Open Educational Resources library guide at the following link:
OER adoption is the practice of taking existing OER and making use of them in your course, with minimal changes. As the diversity and depth of OER continues to increase, this option is becoming increasingly feasible. The principal task in adopting OER is locating and evaluating OER to find one that suits your needs.
You can find more about finding, evaluating and adopting OER in our OER Capability Toolkit. Direct link below:
Often there is no OER that perfectly fits a teacher's needs. However, with the flexibility granted by Creative Commons licences, OER can be adapted, combined and remixed to suit an audience. The OER capability toolkit has a dedicated chapter on adapting OER, covering the details of the appropriate licences, the process of making changes, and distribution of your finished adaptation.
You can find a link to this chapter below:
While many OER can be found online (see our Open Educational Resources (OER) library guide), the best option may be to create a new resource. This is often not as daunting as it sounds. Platforms for building and hosting new OER now exist and are supported by the Library Open Publishing Team. The team can assist you in making your new resource open, accessible, and adaptable. The Open Publishing Team has created a set of guides to OER and open publishing, listed below, to introduce and explain the process.
As part of its commitment to open scholarship in all its forms, RMIT is expanding its capacity to create and promote new open educational resources (OER). One element of this is open publishing, the creation of new or adapted works which are published with an open licence.
Image: Copyright © 2023 RMIT University is provided under CC-BY-NC-4.0
RMIT Open Press is the imprint under which open textbooks are published at RMIT. Open textbooks by RMIT authors are published on Pressbooks, a self-publishing platform. Pressbooks enables authors to integrate text, multimedia and activities in a dynamic resource for teaching and sharing freely with learners and teachers.
You can access RMIT Open Press at the link below.
Staff interested in developing an open publication are encouraged to contact the RMIT Open Publishing Team via an Expression of Interest form. We can discuss your project and include copyright in the discussion from the start. We can let you know about available supports and guide you through the process. Opening this communication channel early helps to avoid issues later particularly with formats, IP and copyright.
RMIT University is a member of the Council of University Librarians (CAUL) Open Educational Resources Collective. The Collective aims to facilitate the collective authoring of open textbooks. This includes the opportunity for academic authors at RMIT University to apply for DIY Open Textbook Grants. To find out more, see the RMIT Open Press page linked below:
This Library guide by RMIT University Library is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, except where otherwise noted. All reasonable efforts have been made to clearly label material where the copyright is owned by a third party and ensure that the copyright owner has consented to this material being presented in this library guide. The RMIT University logo is ‘all rights reserved’.