Introduction

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)? Why should you incorporate OER into your classroom? What are the benefits? What are your major responsibilities for incorporating OER into your learning setting? What are some resources you might use to do so?

These are the key topics throughout this “Incorporating OER into the Classroom” module. The following infographics provide quick, concise information about the logic and benefits of adopting OER and some of the major components you will need to consider when adopting OER. Use these items as a reference guide as you are developing or revising OER to ensure that you have planned all major elements (e.g. licensing, usage rights) or as marketing materials to expand the outreach of the OER movement. 

Integrating OER into the Classroom

The following job aid in includes a comprehensive manual explaining the intrinsic components of OER as well as space for planning and writing notes on OER-based lessons. Use this in conjunction with the module lesson plan templates/examples to plan your instructional units and verify that you have addressed all key aspects of OER. 

Implementing OER in the Online Graduate/Professional Classroom (PDF version)

This module includes several examples of lesson plans. These lesson plans are not exhaustive--they do not cover every topic area or target audience type. However, they do provide a variety of styles for specific learner types such as graduate students and K-12 learners. 

OER-based lesson plans will appear differently depending on the type of class that is being developed. Therefore, this guide provides a sample of a few of the starkly different learning contexts through examples of how users may adapt resources into their classrooms. The lesson plans should be used in conjunction with planning tools such as the infographics and job aid. 

A blank lesson plan template is also provided. This template is designed for a K-12 classroom, but could be easily adapted for other learning groups with the exclusion of certain areas like “Standards”. This blank template is provided with the hope that as teachers use it as a resource they will also return to the source and share their own examples. This will ideally result in OER-based example lessons that cover a variety of subjects and content areas.