Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Adapt & Create OERs

Creating and Customizing OERs

Adapting an existing OER or creating your own lets you align materials precisely with your course outcomes, context, and students.

Start by planning scope and audience, then choose an authoring path—adapt (revise/remix an existing OER) or create (author new content) using tools such as Pressbooks, LibreTexts, or OER Commons’ Open Author, with H5P for interactive elements.

Apply a clear Creative Commons license, document attributions and changes, and build in accessibility from the start (headings, alt text, captions, contrast).

When you’re ready, publish and preserve your work—e.g., in DigitalCommons@EMU—with good metadata so colleagues and students can find, cite, and reuse it.

Tools for Adapting & Creating

Pressbooks
A digital publishing platform that lets educators create, adapt, and publish accessible open textbooks and OER to the web, PDF, and EPUB—with optional H5P interactivity and LMS integration.
LibreTexts
OER platform with a large, discipline-spanning library of open textbooks and course materials, plus tools to create/remix/publish and the ADAPT system for interactive homework and LMS integration.
OER Commons Open Author
A free, in-browser tool to create and publish OER—letting you write or import (Google Docs/Word), add metadata, choose a CC license, and (where permitted) remix existing resources—with a built-in accessibility checker.
H5P
An open-source tool for creating and reusing interactive content—like interactive video, presentations, and quizzes—that works inside major LMSs (Canvas, Brightspace, Blackboard, Moodle) via plugins/LTI and supports easy sharing and embedding.

Licensing

Creative Commons License Chooser
A step-by-step tool that helps you select the right CC license (or CC0) for your work and generates copy-and-paste HTML/icons with machine-readable metadata for marking your content.
CC License Compatibility Chart
The Creative Commons “cc_license_compatibility” page explains which CC licenses can be combined when remixing works and includes a compatibility chart (with notes on ShareAlike constraints) to guide reuse.

Publishing at EMU

Share your OER through DigitalCommons@EMU to give it a stable, citable home with a permanent link, better discoverability, and usage metrics you can reference in syllabi, CVs, and reports.

The library will walk you through a simple submission—confirming license, metadata, and basic accessibility—and handle the repository publishing details.

Open Educational Resources

This OER guide is for EMU faculty and lecturers who want to find, adopt, adapt, or create no-cost, openly licensed course materials.

Creating and Customizing OERs

Tools for Adapting & Creating

Licensing

Publishing at EMU