OER Commons: Open Author
Why OER Commons and Open Author?
When we designed this course, our Adult Learning Zone design team contemplated a variety of authoring tools and online hosting platforms for the educational resources that will be designed and developed in this course. We had two important requirements:
- The online platform that would house our educational resources had to be reliable, sustainable, and efficient at indexing content.
- The authoring tool(s) to develop our educational resources had to be user friendly to accommodate both novice and expert designers
OER Commons was an immediate top choice, because it offered not only reliable and sustainable hosting capabilities for our content, but also Open Author, an easy to use online development tool. In addition, OER Commons, created in 2007 by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) Links to an external site. has long been a home for quality open educational resources, and our subject matter experts knew many adult educators would be familiar with the website.
To Launch Open Author
As noted above, the navigation and menu options have changed slightly on the OER Commons website from when the video above was produced. See the instructions below for how to launch Open Author from the new menu navigation structure within OER Commons:
1. Select "Create" on the OER Commons navigation menu Links to an external site.:
2. Select "Start Authoring" under Open Author Links to an external site. to launch Open Author. Please do NOT use Lesson Builder (geared to K12) or Module Builder (geared to Higher Ed).