Open educational resources (OER) address the rising costs of education and have the potential to facilitate new styles of teaching and learning by giving faculty the ability to choose, modify, and “assemble” resources in unique ways. (Educause, 2010 - 7 Things You Should Know About Open Educational Resources)

During this session, we will discuss how OER benefit faculty and students by addressing the rising costs of textbooks and concerns regarding copyright restrictions by providing faculty with resources they can openly share with students for no cost or a reduced cost.

We will outline how we integrate OER into our faculty development program at the University of Central Florida and encourage faculty to consider utilizing these resources as they design and develop their online courses. One of the biggest concerns instructors have as they design and develop online courses is regarding copyright restrictions. A best practice we recommend to address this concern is to determine if there is existing content available for use in their course by exploring publisher materials and OER. In order to provide access to OER, we created a Diigo social bookmarking page with a list of links and descriptions of OER for our faculty to explore, including digital repositories (e.g., Merlot, Connexions), open textbooks (e.g. Orange Grove, Writing Commons), and open course ware (e.g., MIT, Yale).

In addition to the resources provided on our Diigo page, we provide our faculty with strategies to search for public domain and copyright free sources for images including Creative Commons, Library of Congress, and Flickr. Some of our faculty members have chosen to supplement their online course materials with OER and others are contributing to OER by authoring digital open textbooks. We will also share how we apply Creative Commons licenses to several of the resources that we have created in order to share them with other faculty and universities. Through these processes, our faculty become familiar with policies relevant to open educational resources.

We will also share our UCF Teaching Online Digital Repository that contains online teaching strategies, best practices, and artifacts from faculty members. We integrated this repository throughout our faculty development program to share online teaching strategies and resources with our faculty and encourage them to contribute strategies and artifacts to this open repository.

This session will benefit faculty members, instructional designers, and administrators. Attendees will receive a handout with several resources, including links to our Diigo page with a list of OER resources and our Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository. We will provide an opportunity for questions and answers throughout the presentation and will ask participants to discuss and share how they are integrating OER into online courses.

The objectives for this session are as follows:

• Identify how open educational resources benefit faculty and students.
• Identify resources to provide faculty access to open educational resources.
• Discuss strategies to educate faculty on policies relevant to open
• educational resources.
• Discuss strategies to enable faculty to contribute to and create OER themselves.