Introducing the OER Publishing Style Guide
In today's digital landscape, Open Educational Resources (OER) have emerged as a powerful catalyst, reshaping the way knowledge is created, disseminated, and consumed. As educators, we can harness these dynamic resources to engage learners effectively.
The OER Publishing Style Guide is crafted to empower educators and professional staff with the essential tools and knowledge to develop Open Educational Resources in line with Deakin standards, requirements, processes. Utilise the resources, steps and tips in this guide to produce high-quality, accessible, dynamic and copyright-compliant OER for use at Deakin and beyond.
What you can expect from this guide
There are a number of sections to this guide, you may choose to work through the information sequentially or use this more as a reference guide. To help you understand which sections to use at what time, the below categories group the guide pages:
Preparing and Plannning
Project management & Copyright and licencing
Writing and Creating
Resource types & Using pressbooks for OER
Reviewing and Editing
Peer review & Resource types
Publishing and Sharing
Publishing the OER
Evaluating and Maintaining
After publication
Adapted from the Open Educational Resources Collective Workflow by Council of Australians University Librarians is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Before you start developing your OER
Before you begin developing your Open Educational Resource (OER), it's important to have a solid starting point so you can make the most of your time, effort and the resources that are in-place to support OER initiatives. Work through the below steps to kickstart your journey:
- Look at the Open Educational Resources (OER) guide to understand what an OER is - OER are different from other learning resources as their open licence allows adaptation and reuse
- Examine How to Find OER? - the resource that you want to develop may already exist or you may find quality resources to adopt, adapt or reuse. Try searching Pressbooks or Open Textbook Library for books and OER Commons or MERLOT for other resource types
- Discuss with your colleagues and Faculty - especially your Director of Teaching to ensure that your project aligns with faculty strategic plans
- Contact the library to see what support we can give you - involving the Open Education and Copyright Teams will set you up for success from the start. Email our team at opened@deakin.edu.au and the copyright team at copyright@deakin.edu.au.
The library has also created an Evaluation Checklist to assist you in reviewing already existing content you may want to adapt in creating your own OER.