Toolkits

This toolkit is aimed at higher education stakeholders who are working with Open Educational Resources (OER). It explains the notion of copyright and describes the different licensing options available to the author/creator of a work. Whether you are wanting to license your own work, or are tasked with clearing copyrighted documents, you will find comprehensive information about the basic concepts in copyright and licensing, the types of open licences that exist, and tools and techniques to provide support.

The toolkit has the following sections, each section comprises sub-sections that provide more detail on the focus issue.

1. Basic definitions and concepts.
2. Creative Commons licences.
3. Applying a licence to your work.
4. Copyright clearance.

The AgShare Toolkit provides resources that can be used and referred to by trainers, faculty, staff, and graduate students to assure that the outputs developed for research and farm communities will follow best practices.

The Guide to Blended Learning is an introduction using technology and distance education teaching strategies with traditional, face-to-face classroom activities. This Guide has been designed to assist teachers adopt blended learning strategies through a step-by-step approach taking constructivist and design-based approach and reflecting on decisions taken to provide authentic learning experience in their own contexts. It provides a general discussion of types of blended learning in reference to the level of education, the needs of the students, and the subject being taught. This discussion and associated activities also review pedagogy, materials, and technology usage. Divided into eight chapters, each of these provide an overview video that triggers learning events for the teachers to focus and work on implementing blending learning.

The guidelines describe the whole process for designing and implementing OER policy in seven chapters, each representing a clear phase in the whole process. The chapters introduce the purpose of the phase and provide background information and references with practical examples for illustration. At the end of each chapter, specific tasks are set for the policy-maker, which will help with formulating of the final OER policy.

The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project was a four-year (2013–2017), large-scale networked project which set out to contribute a Global South research perspective on how open educational resources can help to improve access, enhance quality and reduce the cost of education in the Global South. The project engaged a total of 103 researchers in 18 sub-projects across 21 countries from South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, coordinated by Network Hub teams at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Wawasan Open University.

This chapter forms part of a project activity toolkit, which is comprised of five documents outlining activities associated with each of the ROER4D UCT Network Hub pillars of project management activity: networking, evaluation, communications, research capacity building, and curation and dissemination. It is hoped that these chapters will be of practical use to other projects attempting to integrate any of these functions in their operational strategy.

The Publishing Cooperative Advisory Group has revised its Publishing Toolkit, expanding the content into two new openly licensed toolkits – the OER Publishing Project Toolkit and the OER Publishing Program Toolkit.

The OER Publishing Project Toolkit is designed to assist librarians and project facilitators who support academic (faculty) authors who are creating and publishing OER projects. It offers a variety of resources to use at the project level such as templates, style guides, tutorials, checklists, author guidelines, and ready-to-use forms.

The OER Publishing Program Toolkit is designed for librarians and staff who manage OER publishing programs. This second toolkit guides project managers on how to structure, implement, and assess open textbook publishing programs.

This resource is the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) site. Librarians can study it to see how to capture news, comments and track progress on open access and research. 

Ideas for CPD interventions

The site runs on free software which can be adapted. Also, libraries can decide to teach students, lecturers and researchers how to upload the information about their open access initiatives to the site.

This resource provides tools and standards for developing and integrating metadata as well as maps metadata structures used by heritage institutions. This material could be used by librarians for learning about metadata. They could also use it a reading in a library guide on Metadata.

This resource is tailored towards school libraries but it has a number of digital curation tools that academic librarians can use and/or introduce to their user communities.

The resource lists content management, technical and communications skills needed for managing institutional repositories. Librarians could use it as a checklist to understand what they need to learn in this regard.

This is a quality assessment framework for Library guides. However, it can be adapted and applied to other information services in academic libraries. Librarians can use the framework to understand performance metrics for their library services.

The purpose of this resource is to provide guidance for academic libraries seeking to incorporate dashboards and other data visualization tools into their assessment practice.

This suite of resources developed by Canadian Association of Research Libraries would lead librarians into an understanding of how to create data visualization tools such as  dashboards for aligning performance indicators of theiroutputs for excellent academic library services.

This resource will help librarians learn how to document their data before depositing it in a data repository using DataCite Metadata schema and formalized specific metadata standards

This resource will guide librarians about where they can store their projects.

"Learning Data Ethics for Data Sharing" is an Open Educational Resource (OER) for library students, data librarians, or researchers interested in learning how to ethically share data into data repositories.

This resource is specifically targeted at the library field and covers the major aspects of ethical sharing of data. The book is divided into chapters that can be repurposed and/or facilitated by the CPD coordinator. 

This is a suite of resources that a CPD coordinator can use to start librarians on their way to advocating/pushing for a data management policy including how to build a coalition of allies and stakeholders as well as tips on promoting the policy.

The Toolkit for Developing Human Resource Policies and Supportive Institutional Environments in Higher Education is aimed at providing a practical guide for universities to evaluate, enhance, or establish effective HR policies and practices. It provides a straightforward approach to identifying policy gaps, aligning with best practices, and creating an environment that prioritises fairness, staff wellbeing, and career growth. While based on widely recognised HR management principles, the toolkit can be tailored to fit various institutional types and national contexts. By using this toolkit, higher education institutions can lay a strong foundation for enhanced staff engagement, improved institutional effectiveness, and strategic alignment, thereby ensuring that HR policies and environments meet both current and future demands.

This Guide comprises three sections. The first – a summary of the key issues – is presented in the form of a set of ‘Frequently Asked Questions’. Its purpose is to provide readers with a quick and user-friendly introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) and some of the key issues to think about when exploring how to use OER most effectively.

The second section is a more comprehensive analysis of these issues, presented in the form of a traditional research paper. For those who have a deeper interest in OER, this section will assist with making the case for OER more substantively.

The third section is a set of appendices, containing more detailed information about specific areas of relevance to OER. These are aimed at people who are looking for substantive information regarding a specific area of interest.