Digital skills for collaborative OER development/Digital skills/Find OER

=Finding OER= There is no definitive source for locating OER (as there is no definitive source for locating closed educational resources). Your skills in finding OER will improve with experience in developing open courses. This involves developing your knowledge for finding how open licenses are attributed on different sites and improving your online search skills. The open education space is a very dynamic field and you will find that some web pages providing links on where to find OER may be out of date. For this reason, it is important to participate in open education community lists to network and keep up to date with recent developments in the field.

OER course designers and developers need to know what to look for and where and how to source OER materials. For example:


 * OER assets to incorporate into your course, such as images, sound or video
 * Full courses which you can adapt and modify
 * Research articles to support undergraduate and postgraduate learning
 * Open textbooks

When in doubt about the legal permissions associated with resources you find, visit the "terms of reference" or "copyright" link on the site concerned. In time, you will learn which repositories support searching by Creative Commons license types in your field of interest and use these as your primary sources.

In this section we provide two activities and a few additional links to get you started with finding OER.

Building the commons
In your discipline, you may not find the specific resources you were looking for. You can make a difference by filling the gap. By by releasing your outputs under open licenses, you can help build the education commons so that future searches for OER by your colleagues will render more positive results.