Welcome to Treasure Hunting for OERs presented by the Kishwaukee College Library.
During this short video, I will show you how to find OER treasures. Let's begin our quest.
Kish Library Staff asked our students what they would buy if textbooks were free.
Some of their answers were a little silly but most were quite revealing.
They would buy clothes, food, medicine, and feel a sense of financial stability.
We need to do what we can to lessen the cost of textbooks and course materials for our students
which will, hopefully, result in our students being more successful while they are here at Kish.
Open Educational Resources are textbooks, learning activities, course materials, media,
even whole courses that are more freely available than copyrighted materials and are usually
low-cost or free, saving our students money. The authors or creators of the OER material
determine how their works can be used by assigning creative commons licensing.
Most Open Educational Resources have creative commons licensing already assigned. For example,
CC stands for Creative Commons which is a form of copyright and shows how people can use the OER.
BY stands for Attribution and has to do with giving credit to the author or creator of the OER.
NC means non-commercial meaning that the material won't be sold for a profit.
SA stands for share alike and allows adopters of the OER to make changes, like switch chapters
around. Usually, the licensing for the altered OER has to be the same Creative Commons licensing
as the original. ND or no derivatives means that the work can only be distributed
in its original form and this is the most restrictive of the Creative Commons licensing.
A combination of these two letter abbreviations indicates how the work can be used. For example,
an OER textbook with creative commons licensing of BY NC SA
means that users of the work should give credit to the creator
(BY), users cannot sell copies of the work (NC), and users can make changes to the original (SA).
Now, let's begin our Treasure Hunt. I'll show you how to find OERs using Kish Library Resources.
All of Kish Library's resources can be accessed through the Library's public website.
Go to the Library link in the footer of the College's website at kish.edu.
First, we'll start with Kish Library's guide to finding OERs.
It is available from the Library's website under the Faculty Resources tab.
Once you open the Faculty Resources tab, click on the Open Educational Resources link on the left.
Notice the navigation menu on left. Let's look at the Open Textbook tab.
I recommend the OpenStax and OER Commons Open Textbooks catalogs.
Both of these repositories have peer reviewed textbooks and other OER classroom materials.
Open Stax allows you to search by broad subject categories.
OER Commons has a library of resources organized by disciplines.
The Kish Library OER Guide provides access to a lot of other OER repositories, and it is
worth the time to do some treasure hunting here. Notify library staff that you are looking for OER
options and we can recommend specific OER catalogs and repositories depending on your discipline.
You can access our electronic and print collections from the Library's public website.
Go to the section "looking for library resources."
Under the "list of online databases" link, we can access the A-Z Database Guide.
We can check EBSCOhost for possible resources and course materials. Let's check out the EBSCOhost
"Combined Search of All Databases" to search in EBSCOhost. We'll do a search for studio arts and
techniques. EBSCO provides access to journal, newspaper, and magazine articles and eBooks,
too. You can put persistent links to EBSCOhost resources directly in your Brightspace course
or use the Library's Electronic Reserves service that integrates into Brightspace.
Even if you don't use a library resource for your OER, you can still use the Library's
eReserves service for that integration. Please contact library staff for help with this.
Next, I'd like to show you Library SmartSearch.
Library SmartSearch gives you access to the Library's book, article, and media collections
plus 4.5 billion resources available online. You can access Library SmartSearch
on the Library's website under the section "looking for library resources."
The "list of online databases" will bring up our A-Z Database Guide. Let's do a search in Library
SmartSearch which is a good place to find online resources that are Open Access. We'll search for
our topic on Studio Arts Techniques. Notice that under Tweak Your Results on the left
you can select to look at only Open Access resources. Open Access items such as journal
articles and ebooks are always free to read and are usually available online and never require
passwords, payments, or restrictions to read. Usually, Open Access sources are labelled with
the Creative Commons licensing for attribution, no derivates, and many are copyrighted works.
Once you have identified one or more OERs, you'll go through the textbook adoption process with the
Bookstore. The Bookstore can also help you create course packets. If you find more than one OER,
check with Library staff to see if we can make a guide for you to go along with our eReserves. That
way you can provide the Bookstore a single access link for your students on the textbook list.
You may not find the perfect OER for your course, so please consider modifying an existing OER
or even creating your own OER. Contact Library staff if you need help finding repositories or
catalogs of OER materials. You'll have lots of questions while you are going through the process
of adopting OERs for your courses and we are here to help you through that process.