Incorporating OER into courses: An Instructors Guide: Home

Teaching without a textbook is often “sold” as a way to reduce costs to students who are required to purchase textbooks, which are often expensive. Although EIU provides textbooks through Textbook Rental Service, using Open Education Resources (OER) may reduce textbook purchasing costs to the university, but more so, it will provide students with current and up to date materials. These materials may supplement a course textbook with real world examples, new trends in a particular field of study, or fill gaps or expand on concepts from a textbook or stand alone as the main source of content.

While this may seem like a great idea, putting it into practice is daunting and overwhelming. Lin, 2019, stated that “… researchers indicated that OER has not been systematically integrated into the curriculum due to several critical challenges…”. Three challenges identified are that instructors are unfamiliar open technology; institutional support is not widely available for developing and incorporating OER into course curriculum; and faculty do not have quality assessment tools to select the best sources (Lin, 2019, pg. 3). 

As you keep up to date with your field, you are probably engaging with professional organizations and reading industry journals regularly. This information can be valuable to students as well. This libguide will lead you through the process of including OER into your courses, or for you and your colleagues to develop a set of resources related to specific subjects to draw upon for courses, projects, and research.

Under the Suggested Reading tab, you’ll find a list of articles to support the use of OER. The following is a summary of some more relevant to our institution:

It appears that two articles in the Journal of Economic Education may be related to the same course. One, “Economics ripped from the headlines: The Economist as course text”, explains the value of using topics in the weekly journal of “economic concepts, theories, and ideas to analyze the daily news and current events of the world…”. (Moryl, 2021, p.333) Using a “common, consistent news source” assures the quality of the information. It is supported by a supplementary textbook. An interesting comment in this article is that the content is real time, “neither the instructor nor the students know exactly what events and issues will be covered each semester” but the faculty member is “consistently able to apply the key economic tenants”. (Moryl, 2021, p. 344) The author did state that standard lecture content was prepared that could be reused in future semesters which reduced some prep time.

The second article discusses the use of current event readings as the basis of specific assignments that serve as formative and summative evaluation. The assignments and activities are scaffolded to begin with low stakes exercises (formative) that are guided and supported by the instructor. Writing assignments and exams are considered high-stakes and summative. Rubrics are included for grading clarification and all assignments are connected to economic competencies or principals. (Andrews, 2021)

An article in Educational Planning from China, suggested the importance of using social events, even negative ones, to support education value. A large section of the article discussed the influence of social events on education and how education must reflect real life, which was a key part of the theories developed by educational philosopher John Dewey. This article also shared a chart which explained how social events could be incorporated in teaching from elementary through college level. (Liu & Tan, 2019)

Baugh and Van Camp (2015) reported that adolescents and young adults’ level of engagement related to political, social, and civic issues was very low. They continue by suggesting that increased focus on test scores in reading and math have contributed to the lower level and that it is important that the task of engaging students is very important at the college and university level. While the themes are related to social and clinical psychology, the article discusses the process by which assignments and activities are constructed and evaluated. A student exit survey showed that the students appreciated how the course topics with current events allowed them to explore different points of view and increased their knowledge of the topics.

Andrews (2021), Baugh and Van Camp (2015), and Liu and Tan (2019) all included charts in their articles which explained how current event topics were incorporated with course themes or discipline competencies, and examples of discussion questions or writing prompts.

EIU faculty survey quotes about OER

The survey results told us that although many (70%) are not currently using OER, many (71%) said they’d consider developing OER with the right support and time.

Reasons why our faculty do, or will, use OER:

• To supplement dated textbook material
• I have not found a textbook that matches the course content needs
• I want students to get a differently worded explanation of a topic
• For quality and to help online students who are off campus.
• To circumvent TBR restrictions
• To supplement the textbook that supports a course activity or enhances my vision for the course.
• OER offers additional quality readings
• To add free materials to class

Please consider joining this work group. Three sessions will be held this Fall. All participants will receive a copy of the Best Practices in Designing Courses with Open Education Resources book. Click the following link to register:

Open Educational Resources (OER) Workgroup - Fall 2023

• Connect with your Subject Librarian

Contact information

Delivery Modalities

We are fortunate to have subject/content area librarians to support the faculty at EIU. Please be sure to reach out to the library specialist assigned to your department for assistance.

FDIC has several copies of Best Practices in Designing Courses with Open Education Resources available to direct your OER journey. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 may be most useful in terms of offering practical solutions for identifying sources and incorporating them into your courses.

PART I Overview

Chapter 1 – Introduction to OER

Chapter 2 – OER Essentials

PART II Course Design

Chapter 3 – Adopting, Adapting, and Authoring

Chapter 4 – Plan Out Your Course with OER

Chapter 5 - Designing with Student Engagement in Mind

PART III Teaching and Learning

Chapter 6 Teaching with OER

Chapter 7 Learning with OER

PART IV Scaling Up

Chapter 8 Supporting and Planning

Chapter 9 Faculty Development

Chapter 10 Challenges and Possible Solutions

Three major categories of OER

1. General collections/repositories (Booth Library, ESBCOhost)

2. Discipline-based, special interest collections (think your professional organizations)

3. Meta sites (Booth, Gale)

Finding Content

Where do you look for content and materials? You can always start with a Google search! As the subject matter expert, you the faculty member can decide the credibility, reasonableness, and value of the sources.

Any of the following could be locations to find your content:

1. 1. Publishers
   2. Web search
   3. Colleagues
   4. Professional organizations
   5. Previous instructors
   6. Real world case studies
   7. Develop your own material

2. Steps to create and curate your OER

These are the basic steps to follow:

• Plan.
• Pick a Tool.
• Make Accessible.
• Use Other Resources.
• Share.
• Update & Evaluate.

If you have completed the FDIC OCDi training for teaching online courses, you have used the Instructional Materials Worksheet. This is a valuable tool to use for creating your own set of OER. You may access this through the D2L OCDi course, or by contacting Julie Lockett for access to the OCDr (resources).

Finally, as you are creating and curating your collection, it is important to cite and provide proper attributions. Once again, working with your EIU Booth library specialist is a great place to start. The Attribution Builder Tool from Open Washington, https://www.openwa.org/open-attrib-builder/ is an easy way to create a correct citation.

For more resources, see suggested reading.