Open Educational Resources: Sharing

If you have adopted or created open course materials, you will find many reasons to share (not to mention requests to share!). Sharing is what the open movement is all about: modifying, customizing, and sharing course materials is at the core of OER work. 

This section outlines some reasons for making your materials discoverable, as well as Best Practices for making your content as open and available as possible. 

Best Practice: Mark your materials with a Creative Commons license

Before sharing your materials, make sure that others know of your intent to share by marking your materials with the Creative Commons license of your choice!  If you need help choosing a license or marking your materials, email us at oer@pcc.edu.

Best Practice: Communicate with the bookstore

Even though you may not be using materials that students have to purchase, the bookstore is often the first place students look for course materials. If you are using open materials, respond to the "Book Order" emails that go out each term from the bookstore and work with them to create an appropriate materials listing. Employing these best practices will help!

Best Practice: Create a Resource List 

Having all of your open materials in one place is handy for sharing and for reporting your work within your institution. If you use a variety of open resources (articles, ebook chapters, videos, etc) in your class, create a document that collects all of the links. Here is an example from a 5-week, 1-credit section of LIB101 taught at PCC in Spring 2018. 

Best Practice: Hosting

You will need to have your OER hosted somewhere online for others to find it. At PCC, there are two institutional options:

• Google Drive (tutorials and instructions on using Google Drive for instruction)
• an online D2L course shell 

You can also host your course materials on a personal website or wiki.  Other options like Pressbooks and Manifold may be available, as well.  Please let us know by emailing oer@pcc.edu if you need support locating a good place to host your materials.

Best Practice: Google Drive Sharing Settings

When setting sharing settings, choose "anyone with the link can view," which is the second most open setting available in Google Drive. The most available setting is "publicly searchable on the web," which is also a fine choice. Click on "Advanced" on the bottom of your sharing dialog box if you do not see these options: 

Best Practice: Making your OER course content Discoverable in D2L

If you are hosting your OER content in an online D2L course shell, you make can make that shell "discoverable" to others at PCC. Faculty interested in using your OER can then enroll themselves in the course. See these instructions for making your course discoverable in D2L. You can also then share an enrollment link with others. Support for enrolling in a shared course is here.

The Instructional Support Sharing OER guide also provides directions on how to export your shell for sharing beyond PCC.  Let us know by emailing oer@pcc.edu if you need help sharing your shell!

If you have created an open text book using Pressbooks or another type of OER platform, it will need to be hosted someplace so that students can access it. Here are a few ideas on how to share with students:

• communicate with the bookstore about your materials and work with them to create an appropriate listing on their website
• link to your OER in your online (D2L) classroom or via email
• download your OER and embed in your online (D2L) classroom
• host externally on a class wiki or personal website
• print copies: please refer to the Using OER tab of this guide for advice on printing at PCC

Here are some places you may share your OER adaptations, creations, and mashups! See the Best Practices section (above) for advice on hosting and Google Drive sharing settings.

• Open Oregon Resources page
• OER Commons: Create an account to share your materials
• To share a complete textbook: Open Textbook Library 
• To share an entire D2L course shell outside of PCC, see the Instructional Support OER sharing guide

Don't forget: you may need to fill out a form before licensing content that you created but PCC owns. For more information, see the Copyright tab of this guide.