This guide provides two options for finding appropriate learning resources for your course and making them available to your students.
- UNH Library
- Open Educational Resources (OER)
Library Resources
The UNH Library provides a variety of services to support faculty in identifying and making learning resources available to students. For faculty convenience these resources are collected here in one place.
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The UNH Library provides these Guidelines in order to avoid violating the rights of authors and publishers. |
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Subject guides provide recommendations for finding articles, books, and background information. Course guides identify course-specific library resources but can also help with similar classes. |
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Books, CDs, DVDs, articles, book chapters, hardware, and even software can be put on reserve at any UNH Library location for limited circulation periods. |
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Course reserves are materials that can request to be made available to their classes for limited circulation periods. |
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Databases provide access to:
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The UNH Library can help facilitate the streaming of films for UNH courses and will purchase rights to stream films whenever possible as requested to support teaching. |
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open Educational Resources (OER) are “… teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.” knowledge (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2016; emphasis added). From full courses to course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, software to other tools or materials, OER are different than other freely-available resources because they include general rights for copying and repurposing (Grodecka and Śliwowskithe, 2014).
Open Educational Resources have many advantages:
- OER provide an ever-increasing source of potential instructional materials, allowing faculty to go beyond the textbook in order to enrich courses and curricula. Using OER can be more engaging for both students and instructors because the materials can be customized, timely, and provide variety.
- OER can help free faculty from having to “re-invent the wheel,” as faculty don’t have to develop new instructional materials from scratch.
- The ability to customize materials allows faculty to adapt materials for very specific uses in their own courses.
- Clearly-stated license provisions up front free faculty from the tedious process of obtaining rights from multiple copyright holders -- and eliminate the uncertainty as to whether the rights for some materials can be obtained.
- For students, OER can provide significant cost savings (textbooks, research articles, and other materials).
OER Repositories
There are many online repositories for Open Educational Resources.
UNH Open Educational Resources Library Guide
Self-Paced Course
This self-paced course is designed to provide you -- as a UNH faculty member -- with an overview of the OER landscape, allowing you to identify, integrate, and (maybe) produce OER for your own courses and to find support for your efforts on your UNH campus. The course is based on fundamental questions about OER:
- Why OER?
- What types of resources are available as OER, and how do I find and evaluate them?
- How are OER licensed?
- How can I integrate OER into my own courses/curriculum?
- What if I want to adapt an OER, or produce my own OER?
- What kind of support is available at UNH?
Introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER): A Self-Paced Course for UNH Faculty
References
Grodecka, Karolina and Kamil Śliwowski. (2014). Open Educational Resources Mythbusting. European Open EDU Policy Project. Retrieved from http://mythbusting.oerpolicy.eu.
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (2016). Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education/open-educational-resources.