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Go Open: a beginner's guide to open education

A guide to engaging with open education practices in your teaching, research and support activities

Using open resources

Once you have found some promising resources, you have to evaluate them, which some repositories will help with by including reviews from others, while others will leave it to you to make your own assessment. Depending on your goals, you may then be able to incorporate the resource into your teaching in a straightforward way, for example, by linking to an open textbook in a reading list, or you may engage in more complicated processes such as adapting a resource to your specific context and/or need. You will need to check the Creative Commons licence related to any resource to know what you can legitimately do with that open resource. You may also need to develop your ability to aid others in working with open resources and developing associated competencies. For example, where you have students engage with open resources such as open data sets.

Digital Humanities Librarian Liam O'Dwyer provides workshops on tools like OpenRefine and Git for DCU staff and researchers based on the Carpentries, a suite of lessons on essential data and coding skills for different audiences such as researchers and information professionals. The lesson contents are all published on Github with a CC-BY licence. They can be reused in their original form for branded Carpentries workshops (by a certified instructor, like Liam), or adapted and customised for Carpentries-based workshops (by anyone).

Sharing open resources

Do not forget to share both the resources you have found and your experiences of finding, evaluating, and using open resources with others. You can make them aware of the utility of open resources and make their explorations in that regard easier. These may be your immediate colleagues or others further afield where you share your experiences through blogging, social media posts. You could deposit your resources in a repository such as Github, Zenodo, OER commons, the OER world map, or in your local repository, where available.