Now it’s time to bring your OER to life! With your design in place, you can begin creating original content—or adapting materials you found earlier in the process.
You may want to incorporate useful open resources into your project if you discovered them during your initial exploration. That’s one of the great things about OER—they’re designed to be reused and adapted. However, it’s still important to keep track of ANY content you didn’t create yourself.
OER typically come with fewer copyright restrictions, but you’ll need to review ALL third-party content you include. Make sure you understand the licensing terms and document what you’re using. This information will need to be reviewed by the Copyright Officer as part of your project, and the resources you use will have to be attributed and/or cited as part of your OER. Remember, the library team is here to help, and you can consult the Copyright Officer in the RRC Library for support or with questions at any point.
Citation and Attribution: How to Credit the Work of Others
Once you’ve created a draft of your OER, it’s time to review your work to ensure it’s accurate, inclusive, copyright compliant and aligned with your learning objectives. This step is essential for maintaining quality and ensuring your resource is ready to be shared.
Review for Copyright Compliance
Meet with the copyright officer; you will need your completed content trackers:
Book An Appointment with the Copyright Officer
Review Software
Hypothesis is a web annotation tool that allows collaboration between authors, reviewers and editors. Pressbooks installations and books hosted at pressbooks.com come with the Hypothesis plugin automatically installed. If you are working with Pressbooks, all you have to do to activate Hypothesis is to go to Settings and configure the app however you want.
Enable Annotation with Hypothesis
Review by Subject Experts
Inviting colleagues to contribute by reviewing a section or the entirety of your OER on a subject for which they are experts is one way to ensure quality information in your OER. Consider what subject experts may be needed to review your OER. It is recommended that a minimum of three subject experts review a project, and that one external reviewer is involved in the project.
Use the following template to guide reviewers for your OER; you may alter or adapt the template to fit the needs of your project.
RRC Polytech offers a wide range of experts and academic support. In addition to colleagues in your subject area, you may consider inviting reviews from: The Library and Academic Services team, Elders and the School of Indigenous Education, communities of practice, industry experts, instructional designers, and accessibility experts.
Student Review
Consider inviting students to review your resource. Their feedback can offer valuable insights into usability and whether the content supports their learning. It’s a great way to ensure your OER is truly learner-centred.
You can use the following rubric when requesting reviews
After gathering feedback from reviewers, it’s time to refine your OER draft. Review the comments and suggestions you’ve received, and decide what changes will strengthen your resource.
Focus on incorporating feedback that:
Incorporate suggested revisions from reviewers thoughtfully, and take this opportunity to polish your content before moving on to the next phase.
Before your OER is ready to be published, it’s essential to complete a final quality check, which includes copy editing. Copy editors add an important element to the creation or revision of a textbook. When they copyedit, these individuals provide an objective set of eyes that ensures grammar and spelling are correct, the established style for a textbook is followed, and the book’s language is suitable and understandable to the readers. Skipping this stage lowers the quality of the textbook.
It is recommended that a trained copy editor(s) be used to perform the final quality assessment check. An author should never copyedit their own work. Limited copy editing services can be sought though Campus MB.
