Getting Started with Open Educational Resources
Each year, Open Access Week reminds us that the future of education depends on openness: not just in how we share knowledge, but in how we imagine what counts as scholarship. While much of the institutional conversation around Open Educational Resources (OER) has centered on open-access textbooks (and rightly so, given their power to lower costs and expand access), there’s a much wider galaxy of opportunity beyond the textbook.
Lesson plans, course designs, assignment sheets, multimedia resources, and assessment tools all fall within the OER universe. These are the creative, high-quality instructional materials that faculty already design to support student learning and then publish for other educators to adapt for their unique teaching contexts. Yet few resources exist to help educators conceptualize and publish this work strategically—or to think about how OERs fit within their broader teaching practice.
Too often, teaching in higher education is treated as the natural extension of disciplinary expertise, as though knowing a subject automatically means knowing how to teach it. But teaching is its own discipline, one that blends art, science, and reflection. When approached with intention, OERs become an extension of that discipline: not just products, but expressions of pedagogical identity. They allow educators to make visible the intellectual and creative labor that goes into designing meaningful learning experiences.
That’s why my colleague Miranda Rodak and I created the Strategically Publishing OERs Toolkit, a resource designed to empower faculty to reflect on their approach to open education and to package their curricular assets in ways that both serve students and demonstrate teaching excellence.
This toolkit empowers instructors not only to create and publish strategic, high-quality OERs but also to explain (or defend) in academic environments still structured by traditional definitions of scholarship and publishing the value of their teaching labor and OER publication.
OERs provide an extraordinary opportunity to circulate innovative teaching practices, amplify faculty voices, and expand educational equity. But doing so well requires intention. After all, open isn’t just about access. It’s about authorship, agency, and the story we tell about how we teach.
