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Considerations for Creating OER

Before creating OER, first consider a few things. The specifics of open licenses vary but in general all OER are created in the spirit of reuse. As such, users of OER must be afforded two things in order to make full use of them. -they need the ability and the permission to exercise the 5 Rs. First, the 5 Rs themselves:
  1. Retain - the right to make, own, and control . . .
  2. Reuse - the right to use content . . .
  3. Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter . . .
  4. Remix - the right to . . . make something new
  5. Redistribute - the right to share copies . . .
of OER.
These points are addressed by the license applied to a work. The license should be of the "open" variety, Creative Commons licenses, and others such as the GNU Free Documentation License address the 5 Rs. Though these are common and practical, neither of these examples are as open as no license at all -putting your work in the Public Domain. Once applied and made of use, a license is immutable. As such, choosing one should be done in an informed and careful way. Be careful though to not let choosing or understanding open licenses become paralyzing or a hindrance to your OER efforts. Someone in your university's library should be able to help you choose a license should you need it.  If not, the open community is a welcoming one and I'm sure would gleefully answer any questions that might come up.
Equally important as the license you apply to a work is users' ability to exercise the rights given by an open license. To address the ability contingency, consider the ALMS Framework. (Wiley) The basis of which is that "Poor technical choices make open content less open." The ALMS framework can be distilled into a few questions:

  • A. Is the open content published in a format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that are extremely expensive or exotic?
  • L. Is the open content published in a format that requires a significant amount of technical expertise to revise or remix?
  • M. Is the open content published in a manner that makes it essentially impossible to revise or remix?
  • S. Is the format preferred for consuming the open content the same format preferred for revising or remixing it?
In general, affirmative answers to these questions are necessary if OER is to be true to the tenets claimed by the open education community. Specifically, open content should be separated from styling. This is a personal soapbox, but one I feel is essential to the long-term success of the open education movement. Styling is platform-dependent and should be applied to each consumable format the content is distributed in. The content itself should have no styling. This allows the content to be portable and malleable so that it can easily be made to fit into a number of platforms and formats. Leave styling to someone informed and versed in addressing issues of accessibility.
Creating OER in this way also allows authors to focus on their area of expertise without the distraction of styling. My personal recommendation is that authors write OER in plain text using a text editor. This might feel uncomfortable at first but I contend that it removes the worry about how a work appears allowing an author to focus on content. Also important to OER authorship is structuring documents well. Spend a few minutes at the outset and draw up an outline that will serve as a guide for the duration of the project.
H1 headings will only be used for chapter titles.
H2 headings will be used for section titles
All images will have captions and alternative text that is descriptive of the contents of the images
Tables that wrap beyond the length of a printed page or height of a screen (independent of device) should be included in an index instead of inline.
etc.
A small amount of planning at the outset of an OER project has the potential to maximize the accessibility, portability, usability, and openness of your work.

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