A good explanation of Open Educational Resources can be found on this page of SURF. For advice on how to make your own interactive open educational resource, you can contact your faculty’s ICTO or video coordinator, the Centre for Innovation or read the advice in the video toolkit of Leiden University.
Finding Open Educational Resources
Keep in mind that you can only use digital resources if the copyrights permit it. To ensure this, have a look at the Creative Commons License. When in doubt, you can contact the UBL Copyright Information Office for assistance.
Assessing existing open educational resources also means judging them on quality and level before you can put them to good use. You will have to make a judgement call or ask a student (assistant) to do it for you, as there are no standardized guidelines. You can also work together with colleagues in your discipline to create a step by step plan for quality assessment.
There are many different ways to find the open educational resources that fit your course. Below an overview of reliable sources and repositories is listed:
- This toolkit from Leiden University describes on which websites you can find quality open access material.
- On the website of Leiden University’s Library, you can find open access literature.
- You can use general or education specific search engines (e.g. OERcommons, Merlot, SURF edusources).
- Repositories are listed in this overview.
- Websites like YouTube and Sketchfab (for 3D images) are full of educational content.
- Digital archives, such as the Dutch National Archive, UK National Archives or US Library of Congress, store and digitize original sources.
- Due to the coronavirus, more resources have been made publicly available, listed by Leiden University's Library.
Using Open Educational Resources
The way you use open educational resources is similar to when you use articles and books written by yourself. Naturally you provide references to the used material. You can look at the most used methods here. However, there can be technical limitations, e.g. how you can implement videos in your learning management system. For this information, check the Brightspace manual.
Making Open Educational Resources yourself
Cannot find what you’re looking for? You could consider making resources yourself or combine forces with colleagues and reduce the effort needed per person. For inspiration, look at this example from the paramedic portal for Higher Education.
If you consider making your material openly accessible, we recommend using the licence CC-BY-NC-SA or contact the Copyright Information Office.