Open Educational Resources (OER)

OER Production Workflow

Prepare

• Review existing OER in your subject area
• OER. copyright and IP training - review our online guidance and get in touch if you have questions!
  • Understand University of Galway IP policy and Innovation Office's Creative Disclosure Form (for if there is a potential commercial application of your creative work)
• Are you confident to start work on your OER?

Pre-production

• Define OER project goals
  • Is your goal to...
    • Replace a textbook currently in use for a course 
    • Create a resource where nothing comparable exists yet 
    • Share knowledge
    • Improve engagement with learning materials
    • Or something else?
• Curate existing OER
  • If you wish to include remixed elements, search OER repositories for existing resources. Check out: The Pressbooks Directory, OER Commons, OpenStax, Open Textbook Library, and Merlot.
• Licensing and copyright check
  • For openly licensed material included, are all licenses compatible with the license put on the new work?
  • Have permissions been sought for any fully copyrighted content included? Any such permissions should be stored such that they can be made available if needed.
• Divide tasks
  • Divide the work by chapter, theme, or task 
• Call for volunteers 
  • Promote your plans for creating OER to groups like Open Scholarship Community Galway to see if anyone is interested in assisting.  
  • Ask for volunteers within your own networks
• Create working documents 

Design

• Outline OER chapters 
  • Working in Open Press, or your word processor of choice, outline the sections and chapters of your OER 
• Scope the media work 
  • How much remixed material will you include? 
  • How much new written material is required? 
  • Will you include H5P assets?  
  • Are new graphic designs required?  
  • Look for open source images to bring life to your OER. 

Develop

• Write/revise content. Talk to us if you need help!
  • Using Open Press or your editor of choice (MS Word – note that Pressbooks’ recommendation is to work directly in the Pressbooks software) 
  • Write with inclusion and diversity in mind 
  • Adopt a style guide  
• Apply accessibility standards 
• Apply inclusion and diversity standards 
• Get peer review / feedback 
  • Peer review is not mandatory for publishing on Open Press but some kind of peer review can help with confidence in a project 
  • This peer review process guide discusses levels of peer review from informal to double-blind and how you might organise this 

Create

• Complete all major revisions 
  • Using Open Press or your editor of choice (MS Word) 
• Import content to publishing platform 
  • You can write directly using Open Press or import content from other sources (MS word) 
• Format and style
  • Read more about applying styles and the appearance of your OER 
• Final quality assurance check 
  • Spell check, peer reading and feedback, and plagiarism check. 

Publish

• Make public on Pressbooks
  • Agree to deposit agreement (agreement forthcoming)
• Archive OER 
  • When ready for OER launch, deposit the first version in the University of Galway Research Repository
  • Also, consider archiving future OER versions in the University of Galway Research Repository 
• Create DOI 
  • For the published OER request a DOI from the Library 

  • Consider requesting a DOI for major revisions or editions of the OER 

• Create ISBN (optional)
  • If required, you can request an ISBN from the library 
• Create export versions
  • You can export your web OER as a PDF for distribution or print-on-demand services and you can also export in formats required for ebook stores. Read more about export versions. 
• [OPTIONAL] Submit Creative Disclosure Form to Innovation Office if there is a commercial potential
• Distribute to students (users) 
  • By adding the OER as a Blackboard LTI