Open Educational Resources (OER)

Adding to a Page

Pages are one of the basic ways of sharing content in Canvas and are a great place to incorporate or link to OER content. Based on what your OER license allows, you could paste whole sections of an OER or your own revised version of the content into a Page. You can also link out to an OER in a Page or upload a PDF version. Some OER services, such as MERLOT, have external apps in Canvas that allow you to directly find and link to or embed OER into your Page. 

Canvas guides

• Creating a Page
• Editing a Page
• Uploading a PDF into a Page
• Linking to an external URL
• Adding from an external app

Adding to Your Syllabus

Your Canvas course comes with a syllabus page that has the editing tools as other Pages in Canvas. This would be a great option to link to or embed OER textbooks that will be used throughout the course. 

Use the Canvas guide for editing a syllabus to learn how to access and edit your syllabus. 

Adding to Modules

Modules are the main method in Canvas for structuring courses such as into weeks or units. Adding OER to modules would be a great way to share readings and activities into those structures.

OER that exist as files, such as PDFs, can be uploaded as course content. Web-hosted OER can be linked to or added as an external tool if the OER provider, such as OER Commons, has an LTI tool that integrates with Canvas. 

Canvas Guides

• Creating a module
• Adding course content (including files) to a module
• Adding an external URL to a module
• Adding content from an external tool to a module

Your students may not be familiar with OER, why you are using them, and how using them might be different than a traditional textbook. It will make it easier on you and on your students if you discuss the course's OER.  

Things you might cover include:

• Why you are using OER and how that benefits them
• How to access the course OER
• Basic technical requirements, such as software needed and if continuous internet access is necessary
• Tools for taking notes in the OER

One option for introducing your course's OER would be adapt the slides below and present them on the first day of class.

Notetaking is an essential tool for students to use to retain and process information. OER come in a wide variety of formats, and the tools on this page can be used by students to take notes directly in many types of OER. 

PDFs

Web-Based OER