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Open Educational Resources: Adapt

A guide to Open Educational Resources (OER) - discover, adopt, adapt, or author free shareable educational content.

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Why adapt an existing OER?

Some reasons for adapting an existing OER include:

  1. Suiting the resource to your curriculum, without starting from the very beginning
  2. Adding case studies from your region or country
  3. Addressing cultural, accessibility or diversity needs
  4. Updating or correcting the information
  5. Adding interactive resources

(Adapted from Adaptation Guide by BCcampus, licensed under CC BY 4.0)

How can I adapt an existing OER?

Using works licensed under Creative Commons or other open licensing means that you have the ability to use them in different ways, including 'as-is' (sharing) or adapting and remixing (creating derivative works).  Creators assign a licence based on how they would like their work to be adapted, any restrictions required for sharing adaptations, and for commercial use.

Don't want to adapt a whole book?

You might discover that there are openly-licensed book chapters, videos or other media, interactive exercises, and quizzes that can be curated and remixed to create a new open textbook.

The University of South Australia OER guide has a list of great resources to get you started. Go to Find OER and look in the 'Other Resources' box.

How can I protect my adaptation? (Using open licences)

Check our Licensing and Copyright page for which kind of open licence will suit your content best and give you the protections you want, along with other considerations.

Evaluation and consistency when adapting

You've found an open textbook that you think will be suitable. Here are some things to consider when evaluating it:

  • Relevance – How well does the content align with your course?
  • Effectiveness – How well does the book present content?
  • Copyright – Does the book have an open licence that allows modifications?
  • Organisation – Does the book follow a logical structure?
  • Balance – Does the book balance text with visuals, and theory with real-world examples?
  • Inclusion and diversity – Is the content (text, images and resources) inclusive? Does it present diverse perspectives?
  • Accessibility – How well does the book follow accessibility standards?

(From the CAUL OER Collective Publishing Workflow)

This video tutorial from Open Education Global shows how to evaluate OER:

You could also use one of these evaluation rubrics:

  1. the iRubric for evaluating OER,
  2. the BCCampus Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Education Resources (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence), or
  3. an evaluation checklist, like this one from the University of Queensland (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License):

When modifying or adding new content to an existing open textbook, try to match the style, structure and layout of the original textbook as much as possible.

Some areas you’ll need to watch out for are:

  • Style – Follow the style guide used by the original author if you can. If this isn’t possible, edit the original content to match the new style (for example, remove Americanisations if adapting an American textbook for the Australian context).
  • Language and tone – Match the tone and language, punctuation and grammar, and chapter and section length of the original textbook.
  • Layout – Use the same pedagogical features (learning objectives, exercises, summaries, recommended readings, etc.), list style (bullet or numbered) and heading styles as the original textbook.
  • Resources – Add the same types of resources, follow the same placement, and use the same labels, captions and attributions.
  • References and citation style – Follow the same citation style for in-text references and reference lists, and use the same placement.

(From the CAUL OER Collective Publishing Workflow)