Supporting you to use existing OER

There is a lot of OER material made freely available by others for you to use. These range from small individual items such as diagrams, quizzes, and lesson plans, to larger items such as complete textbooks. There are several collections of open material for you to explore. As a starting point try:

Open Textbook Library

OER Commons

Open textbooks are indexed in StarPlus but it can be difficult to spot them unless the Creative Commons licence is visible. The licence lets you know to which permissions and rights you have. We are working to improve this to make it easier for you to find OER in StarPlus.

The Library has funding available for teaching staff who are interested in taking a further look at OER. Examples include:

• Identifying and reviewing an existing open textbook and using it as key module reading in place of a commercial textbook
• Employing a student intern to identify and evaluate open educational resources which are relevant to their programme. See this case study from the pilot project.

Contact your liaison librarian for advice on where to start or email oer@sheffield.ac.uk.