Open Educational Resources (OER): Create

The BCcampus Open Education Self-Publishing Guide is a reference for individuals or groups wanting to write and self-publish an open textbook.This guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook. Copyright, open-copyright licences, and the differences between citation and attribution are discussed as well as the importance of copy editing and proofreading. Checklists and templates are also provided. This guide replaces the BCcampus Open Education Authoring Guide

This guide is for faculty authors, librarians, project managers and others who are involved in the production of open textbooks in higher education and K-12. Content includes a checklist for getting started, publishing program case studies, textbook organization and elements, writing resources and an overview of useful tools.

A handbook for faculty interested in practicing open pedagogy by involving students in the making of open textbooks, ancillary materials, or other Open Educational Resources. This is a first edition, compiled by Rebus Community, and we welcome feedback and ideas to expand the text.

A clearinghouse of OER, including learning object repositories, open course repositories, scholarly repositories, open textbooks, and information about open learning/education in general.

Project archive of a two year initiative of the Florida Distance Learning Consortium. Includes a guide to authoring tools focusing on whether tools are free, allow collaboration, can create multiple kinds of outputs, and other important logistical questions. Also includes an overview of the process used by faculty at the University of Florida to author an Introduction to Theater textbook.

Includes 80 online resources that you can use to learn how to build or participate in a collaborative educational effort that focuses on publication and development of those materials. Although some choices focus solely on publication, development, or tools used to accomplish either effort, some provide multifaceted venues that offer communities in which to collaborate on one or all of these efforts.

If you've published a textbook that is several years old, you might be able to use Rights Reversion to obtain the rights to publish a new version as an Open Textbook. Read this story about Dale Cannon's successful negotiation for rights to his book.

Open Learn has a helpful open, modular online course "Creating Open Educational Resources."

Pressbooks is simple book production software, built with the web in mind. Create interactive web books, PDFs for print, and ebooks, all from one place. Write your own book on Pressbooks or import an existing manuscript, then choose a book design theme, and export into all the file formats you need to publish your books. Offers free and priced options.

PubPub is a collaborative writing and publishing platform from MIT's Knowledge Futures group. The basic level for free allows for robust drafting, editing, and publishing features, as well as a URL at pubpub.org and e-mail support.

The Rebus Community platform guides open textbook projects through the publishing workflow and makes it easy to find, recruit, and organize collaborators.

Can be used to create interactive tutorials and mash up text/media.

Free and open technology to design, customize and publish interactive learning experiences.

Easily record and edit videos of action on your computer screen.

The place to upload and store videos for viewing. This link leads to a tutorial on how to upload videos to YouTube.

Google Drive allows you to create web-hosted documents, presentations, forms etc. Each document can be linked to from D2L and centrally maintained (i.e. you can update the google document and it will automatically update within D2L). This can be useful especially if you are using the same material for multiple classes.

Online photo editor and drawing tool. Requires Flash.

Open Source application that creates and edits PDFs and also is a vector drawing and graphics tool. A better option for PDF editing if your document is image-heavy.

An Open Source office suite comparable to Microsoft Office. Document editing, spreadsheets, charts, presentations, small databases, images/PDFs, a mathematical formula editor, etc.

A LibreOffice extension that enables optical character recognition to turn unreadable PDFs into readable ones. This makes them accessible, and is also important because it allows searching.

Open Source application that creates and edits PDF documents.

The longstanding favorite, full-featured, free and open source image editing application. Like Photoshop, the learning curve is steep, so check out the GIMP tutorials.

If you are used to Photoshop, this free and open source image editing application is built on the GIMP source code, but behaves like Photoshop.

Free, open source tool for taking screenshots and editing and annotating them.

Free, open source application used to create flowcharts and other kinds of charts and diagrams.

Open Source audio editing software. For obscure legal reasons, Audacity won't save your work as an mp3 file until you download and install the LAME codec too.