In early March, educators around the world will be celebrating Open Education Week. We thought this might be a good opportunity for those of us here at UNF to take stock of where we are and where we’ve come from in the realm of OER before charting a course for the future at this institution.

Redshelf is a course material delivery model that connects students with discounted eTextbooks and other digital course materials across campus systems.

Regardless of what level of implementation you are in currently - from supplementing a textbook with OERs to teaching an entire course with only OERs - the following tips are best practices for finding and sharing online resources.

Commons is a learning object repository that enables educators to find, import, and share resources with other Canvas users across the globe. A digital library full of educational content, Commons allows Canvas users to share learning resources and import those resources into a Canvas course.

In order to respond to an increasing demand, UNF has adapted its OER Initiative to include new outlets for faculty to author their own OER content.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are free, openly licensed course materials you can use in your courses instead of costly, tightly controlled textbooks. At UNF we support this philosophy by providing incentives for instructors to adopt OERs.

Instructors should reflect on their own practice by regularly considering how their course learning materials acknowledge diverse perspectives and seek to engage diverse and underrepresented populations.