"Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." ~ William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
In addition to using the search engines and repositories linked on this guide, you can also use advanced search features when searching Google, YouTube or Flickr, to find and locate OER. You will still need to confirm the individual license of the object you select to assure it meets the appropriate CC license.
Google - Use the Advanced Search. Under Usage Rights select to limit your results to resources which are free to use, modify or share. More from Google on Usage Rights.
YouTube - After searching by keyword in YouTube, use the Filters feature to filter your results to videos with a Creative Commons License. Looking for more videos? View the Images, Audio & Video tab!
Flickr - After searching by keyword in Flickr, use the Any License filter feature to filter your results to the appropriate usage license which best suits your usage of the work. Looking for more images? View the Images, Audio & Video tab!
Listed below is a sample of several OER Creative Writing materials. Additional OER in your subject may be found by searching the resources listed in the primary ACC Libraries Open Educational Resources Guide.
OER Textbooks:
About Writing: A Guide: This writer’s reference condenses and covers everything a beginning writing student needs to successfully compose college-level work, including the basics of composition, grammar, and research. It is broken down into easy-to-tackle sections, while not overloading students with more information than they need. Great for any beginning writing students or as a reference for advanced students!
Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing in the Classroom is dedicated to the practice of immersive ethnographic and autoethnographic writing that encourages authors to participate in the communities about which they write. This book draws not only on critical qualitative inquiry methods such as interview and observation but also on theories and sensibilities from creative writing and performance studies, which encourage self-reflection and narrative composition.
Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction. Inspired by the provocative science- and social-science-focused book This Idea Must Die and written for a general audience, the collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing.
Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies: Contemplative Writing Pedagogy: In this text, Christy Wenger argues for the inclusion of Eastern-influenced contemplative education within writing studies. She observes that, although we have "embodied" writing education in general by discussing the rhetorics of racialized, gendered, and disabled bodies, we have done substantially less to address the particular bodies that occupy our classrooms. She proposes that we turn to contemplative education practices that engage student bodies through fusing a traditional curriculum with contemplative practices including yoga, meditation, and martial arts.
The Rough Writer's Guide: A Handbook for Writing Well - The Guide provides students with help navigating academic writing, including all aspects of the writing process, MLA and APA formatting, and grammatical and mechanical issues.
Write or Left: an OER Textbook for Creative Writing Classes - A textbook for introductory creative writing classes with condensed chapters and expanded genres. The third version - the 2022 edition - was created in the late fall of 2021 to include a gentler/more inclusive approach to writing and more diverse student examples.
Elements of Creative Writing - This free and open-access textbook introduces new writers to some basic elements of the craft of creative writing.
The Anti-Textbook of Writing - The Anti-Textbook of Writing retains some content from the original Anti-Textbook published in 2013 by Sybil Priebe under Copyright, but it’s been remixed with other OER, plus – the best part – diverse student examples have been added! In addition, the genres unit was expanded to include Tweets Texting and Poetry (etc.), an extended array of strategies will only be included in the Expanded Version.
OER Courses:
Writing Science Fiction This class will focus on the craft of writing genre science fiction. Students write and read science fiction and analyze and discuss stories written for the class. For the first eight weeks, readings in contemporary science fiction accompany lectures and formal writing assignments intended to illuminate various aspects of writing craft as well as the particular problems of writing science fiction. The rest of the term is given to roundtable workshops on student's stories.
OER Supplemental Course Materials:
Composition Reading Bank - A repository of links to freely available texts that replaces a traditional reader for Composition courses
"5Rs image" by David Wiley, Lumen Learning is licensed under CC BY 4.0