Guides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Adapt OER

OER Adoption Tools and Resources

If you have found OER to adapt or remix, you should first check to see if there are any built-in authoring tools available from the repository where you found the OER. Below are tutorials of authoring tools in various OER repositories.

OER Commons: Remix a Resource
If the OER were 1) originally composed by Open Author in OER Common, and 2) have been given use licenses that allow for their editing and remixing, you may use the "remix this resource" option to copy and edit an Open Author resource.
OpenStax CNX: Create a module
See also how to create adaptations of existing OpenStax CNX content.

Below are some resources for adapting, creating, and sharing your own OER:

*note: this was reused and adapted from Kirkwood Community College Library's guide on open textbooks

Authoring Open Textbooks
Modifying an Open Textbook
Details 6 basic steps to modifying and hosting an existing open textbook or other OER.
OpenStax CNX: Localization and OER
"In the context of OER, localization refers to the process of taking educational resources developed for one context and adapting them for other contexts. These contexts can, for example, be geographical, pedagogical, political, or technical. The practice of localization encompasses more than the translation of materials into a local language or swapping a photo to reflect a culture. Localization is at the heart of the OER process—it exemplifies diversity, openness, and reusability."

Open Textbook Adoption Worksheet

Open Textbook Adoption Worksheet (Community College Consortium) [pdf]

Created by Dr. Judy Baker, Director of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, this resource simplifies the process of finding and adopting an open textbook.

Next Generation OER Courseware: Platform review, best practices, and sharing your custom oer course

Watch Recording

Open Textbooks

Bookboon.com
Bookboon's free online textbooks for students are focused and to the point. They are all written by highly respected professors from top universities in the world and cover topics such as economics, statistics, IT, engineering and natural science.
Curriki
A hub for free, open course materials. Find thousands of course materials in a variety of subjects and grade levels, including free courses and textbooks.
Freebooks4Doctors
With more than 300 medical texts already on hand, makes available PDF ebooks, journals and links to other free medical books. Its mission is to promote the free availability of medical books on the Internet.
FreeTechBooks
A resource which lists out computer science and programming books which are made freely & legally available on the Internet.
National Academies Press
Most books published by the National Academies Press can be downloaded for free in PDF format. Just find the book you want, bypass the print price, and click the “Download Free PDF” button. This site requires that you provide a name and e-mail address.
OER Commons
OER Commons Materials range from pre-k to secondary. Along with other materials textbooks are included
Open Culture
Open Culture has a collection of 150 free textbooks from Art History to Physics and Business.
OpenStax College
OpenStax College offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers
Open Textbooks: Catalog
College texts offered online under a license that allows free digital access, low-cost print options and customization by instructors.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is the place where you can download 33,000 free books! This is a great resource for Literature classes and books for young children.
ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect is a leading full-text scientific database offering journal articles and book chapters from more than 2,500 journals and almost 20,000 books.
Smarthistory.org
A free, not-for-profit, multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook. They are committed to joining the growing number of teachers who make their content freely available on the web.
SpringerOpen
The growing demand for open access publishing has led Springer to expand our open access program to fully open access books as a further addition to our already established SpringerOpen journal portfolio. Authors in all disciplines now have the opportunity to publish open access books, including complete monographs, edited volumes, proceedings and SpringerBriefs.
Textbook Revolution
Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors.. On this site you'll find links and reviews of textbooks and select educational resources. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable online as e-books, or some are simply web sites containing course or multimedia content.
Wikibooks
Wikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational books that anyone can edit. Rather than be subject to expensive static books, Wikibooks readily encourages copying, modifying, reusing, and free distribution of its books.
Worldwide Mathematics
Worldwide Mathematics offers free mathematics textbooks in Calculus and Mutli-Variable Calculus, and includes free lecture series to accompany the content.