In an online course, you will likely be delivering content via online resources in combination with or instead of a lecture format so you will need access to quality resources. Fortunately, a large variety of resources exist to help you find lesson materials, multimedia, activities, assessments and even entire textbooks that are openly licensed or published:
- UHM Library
- Outreach College – Open Educational Resources (OER)
- OER Repositories
The breadth and quality of OER has grown in many fields enabling some faculty to offer “textbook zero” courses that have no additional costs for books! Below you’ll also find an example of such a course, which has also been licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license, making it also an OER course!
UHM Library
The library’s website provides a host of services to assist you with finding resources for your course and training your students. Please see the following site for additional information on services provided to faculty & instructors.
Library Liaison
Liaisons are provided by the library to every college at Manoa to provide a point of contact and direct support for faculty. These liaison’s can assist you with finding high quality course material for your subject area. To find the liaison for your subject see the library’s liaison page.
Workshops
Open Workshops are library sessions on a variety of topics (data visualization, citation management, online publishing tools, etc.) taught by UH Manoa librarians to your students. This free support can help round out skills your students need for tasks such as researching information or writing papers while saving you the effort of conducting the instruction. You can request a workshop directly from the library.
Outreach College – Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources (OER) are free, high quality and community developed educational content available for your courses and students. OER is a growing movement recognizing the cost of educational materials as a growing barrier to higher education and the value of materials that can be customized to a faculty’s needs without worrying about copyright issues. The University of Hawaiʻi has recognized the value of incorporating OER into courses by listing its adoption as a goal in the University’s 2015-2021 Strategic Plan under the High Performance Mission-Driven System (HPMS) strategy and is supported by the Associated Students of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (ASUH).
While the aforementioned library liaisons can assist with finding appropriate OER material for your courses, you can also contact Outreach College through their OER website for additional support.
OER Repositories
In addition to UH’s own OER Repository the following sites can also be searched for additional OER content.
- MIT OpenCourseWare – Wide array of university level course materials
- OpenStax – High school and intro college course textbooks
- Open Textbook Library – Additional textbook options for your course
- Make your own OER – Guidance and assistance from UH
Open Pedagogy
You may want to consider “open pedagogy” approaches to your course. Open pedagogy includes using OER but also designing activities and assessments for students that support creating and disseminating knowledge for public use. In A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students, open pedagogy is described as “an access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education AND as a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable students to shape the public knowledge commons of which they are a part.”
Ideas to consider, have your students:
- Edit and/or contribute to an OER text
- Create lessons, assignments, quiz questions, etc for future use
- Edit Wikipedia articles
- Curate course content
- For more ideas, see A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students
Example Course
LTEC 112: an example of a course that primarily utilizes OER throughout the course.
All material on the course site has been licensed with Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless otherwise noted.