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Open Educational Resources (OER)

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Create and publish your own OER

University of Galway provides a suite of OER publishing tools and platforms to create and promote your own open, free, and reusable OER learning materials. The aim is to provide access to OER creation and publishing for University of Galway students and staff. This is aimed at people interested in making a difference in open education and creating or modifying OERs. Importantly, the promotion of the use and production of OER is a flagship goal in the Open Value of the University of Galway Strategy 2020-2025.

We use the UNESCO definition of OER, “OERs are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions”. 

OERs can be produced and published using several evolving tools and platforms.  As an output of the Student Project Funded OER project, the Library provides University of Galway Open Press. University of Galway Open Press is currently powered by Pressbooks. Pressbooks enables the production and editing of web books and similar content, which can be published under an open licence. This provides an excellent opportunity to produce, or customise, Open Texts and similar materials (e.g. lecture notes, handbooks, manuals, annotated books/memoirs, essay collections, etc). Pressbooks supports embedding multimedia and other components. University of Galway Open Press OERs can be published with a DOI and can even be used privately in the Learning Management System (Blackboard). Pressbooks also allows authors to easily import content and export the resulting publication to a variety of formats, including MOBI, EPUB, and PDF. Pressbooks OER can also be published and shared publicly via the Pressbooks global directory. The Pressbooks global directory is a great place to discover new content and/or import free and open content as a starting point. See University of Galway Open Press for the full experience.

 Supported by the NUI Galway Student Project Fund

For interactive, multimedia content, a range of specialist e-learning authoring tools are already in use across the institution. Separately, there is a site licence for H5P (a CELT project) which is mainly used to produce short interactive content for use within Blackboard. H5P content can also be published and shared externally via H5P.org and the H5P OERHub.

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"Open Educational Resources (OER)" by University of Galway Library is licensed under CC-BY 4.0