The OER Unit supports faculty who are doing one or more of the following:

Adopting

When a faculty member is adopting an OER, they are taking it mainly as is and using it in their course. Generally speaking, those faculty members do not require a lot of help from us except to find the available OER and then choose what fits their needs best. However, they may need help in getting the content into PressBooks.

Adapting

Faculty who are adapting an OER are taking an existing OER and making changes to it, such as removing or rearranging chapters or updating images. Others may be taking two or more OERs and pulling them together to create a new work. This can be very time/labor-intensive. Faculty may need help with merging the materials from the two (or more) OER, getting the page numbering set up correctly and renumbering tables and figures. They may also need help finding new OER materials to incorporate in their text. While adapting seems easy, it’s actually quite tricky because we need to keep track of where the source material came from and make sure we attribute it correctly.

Authoring

Faculty who are authoring are writing their text from scratch, usually based on course materials they are currently using. They may incorporate some OER material, especially images, but the work is essentially their own. This is a long process. Faculty will need help finding OER materials, tracking images they are using, formatting their text, and getting it into PressBooks. They may also need us to create new images for them.