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Open Education

This is a guide on how to find, create, and share Open Educational Resources (OER).

While there are several ways to share your Open Educational Resources once you have created and licensed them, posting them to an Open Educational Resource Repository is a great way to increase the accessibility and audience for your materials. Many repositories will also archive your materials to ensure they are available long-term.

Repositories that Allow Sharing/Uploading

There are several repositories that allow you to upload existing materials or to create content on their platforms to share.

When making decisions about sharing your open educational resource, you need to first have a sense of purpose and intent for sharing. Are you sharing your resource because you want your students to have easy access to the item, are you sharing it for archival purposes, or to share with your network of educators? Answering these questions will help you make a decision as to where you will share your resource and the type of functionality you need for the place you are sharing.

To share your OER, you will need to: 

  1. Develop standard metadata
  2. Select a repository/ies to share 
  3. Develop a marketing plan 

The following resources and templates will assist you in developing your sharing plan and workflow.

UBC Library is providing a free service for UBC users to obtain DOIs for digital objects. Objects deposited into UBC Library repositories: cIRcle (for text, PDFs, audio and video resources), UBC Dataverse @Scholars Portal (for research datasets) or CONTENTdm (for digitized images) will automatically be assigned DOIs and be given persistent URLs that do not break.

If a faculty member wants to assign a DOI to their OER, they must first meet the UBC Library criteria for assigning DOIs and fill out the DOI metadata form. UBC Library can only mint a single DOI at a time. We currently do not support bulk DOI minting

The essential criteria for OER DOI assignment are:

  • At the time of the request, the creator (or equivalent role) of the OER is a current UBC faculty member, researcher, instructor, staff member, or student. 
  • The OER must be openly licensed using a Creative Commons license or equivalent.
  • At the time of submission, the OER must have the six mandatory metadata elements.
    • URI/URL
    • Title
    • Creator(s)
    • Publisher (UBC Library unless another publisher is identified)
    • Publication Year
    • Type of Resource (e.g. Software, Sound, Dataset, Text, etc)
  • A DOI can be minted for an individual resource (e.g. an open textbook) but DOIs will be not minted for individual parts and/or items within a resource (e.g. multiple videos within an open textbook).

For OER DOI support, contact Erin Fields (Vancouver campus) or Donna Langille (Okanagan campus).