If you have adopted or created open course materials, you will find many reasons to share (not to mention requests to share!). Sharing is what the open movement is all about: modifying, customizing, and sharing course materials is at the core of OER work.
This section outlines some reasons for making your materials discoverable, as well as Best Practices for making your content as open and available as possible.
Best Practice: Communicate with the bookstore
Even though you may not be using materials that students have to purchase, the bookstore is often the first place students look for course materials. If you are using open materials, respond to the "Book Order" emails that go out each term from the bookstore and work with them to create an appropriate materials listing. Employing these best practices will help!
Best Practice: Create a Resource List
Having all of your open materials in one place is handy for sharing and for reporting your work within your institution. If you use a variety of open resources (articles, ebook chapters, videos, etc) in your class, create a document that collects all of the links.
Best Practice: Hosting
You will need to have your OER hosted somewhere online for others to find it. At CMU, there are two institutional options:
If you have created an open text book using Pressbooks or another type of OER platform, it will need to be hosted someplace so that students can access it. Here are a few ideas on how to share with students:
Here are some places you may share your OER adaptations, creations, and mashups! See the Best Practices section (to the left) for advice on hosting and Google Drive sharing settings.
Don't forget: You may need to fill out a form before licensing content that you created but CMU owns. For more information, see the Copyright tab of this guide.
Here are some resources and examples of how to craft attribution statements: