OER can be small and ugly and still have a BIG impact
The concept of small OER is inspired by the book Small Teaching by James M. Lang. Lang pulls from psychology and neuroscience to argue that small changes to classroom instruction can have an outsized impact on student learning. In the book, he notes:
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“As much as I frequently felt the urge to shake up my teaching practices with radical new innovations, I mostly didn’t. Reconceiving your courses from the ground up takes time and energy that most of us have in short supply in the middle of the semester" (Lang, 2016) “I became convinced of the seemingly paradoxical notion that fundamental pedagogical improvement was possible through incremental change…through small but powerful modifications to our course design and teaching practices” (Lang, 2016). |
Small OER takes the same approach as small teaching. If re-envisioning your entire course around OER sounds too difficult or time-consuming, start with "small OER" and build up over time.
| Small OER Strategies |
| Strategy | Why? |
| Link to open articles, videos, or chapters while still using commercial resources for most of your content. | It gives you time to gradually find open content that works for your course. |
| Use OER to fill existing gaps in course content. | You need to fill those gaps anyway, so why not use open content? It might keep students from having to buy an additional textbook/resource. |
| Use OER to offer alternatives or provide additional practice | You have more to choose from when deciding on course content without incurring an extra cost. |
| Use OER for a single chapter, unit, activity, assessment, etc. | If you do this consistently over several semesters, you can eventually switch to all free materials. |
| Use an OER syllabus or lesson plan found in a repository but only use what fits. | Get new ideas, new inspiration, and free materials to improve your course. |
| Medium OER Strategies | |
| Adopt an OER textbook for your class. | This can be a great move at any time, but especially when you have to prep a new class since you have to start from scratch. |
| Use both OER and LER (Library-Licensed Resources available from library databases) |
You’re still using no-cost materials but mixing open content (free for everyone and adaptable) with library content (free for students and paid for by the library but not adaptable). |
| Large OER Strategies | |
| Revise or remix existing OER textbook(s). |
Adapt an existing OER to your specific course, and/or pull a few chapters/passages from a few different openly-licensed books and put them in one resource. Students probably won’t notice or care if the tone and style change between chapters, and if it bothers you, you can always amend the content as needed. |
| Extra Large OER Strategies | |
| Write your own OER textbook. | This is an especially good option for niche courses for which there isn't existing open content. |
Want to see some small OER created by faculty and graduate students at UNC? Check out the LE@RN projects!
With the support of grant funds from the Colorado Department of Higher Education, staff from UNC's Office of Instructional Design and Development have partnered with faculty and graduate students to create openly licensed digital learning objects for use in Canvas (which can be imported into other Learning Management Systems.)
You can see the projects on IDD's website, download them from Canvas Commons, or access the interoperable .imscc files from UNCOpen.
The idea of c
reating OER can feel intimidating to some instructors. After all, if you don't have any experience using OER creation platforms or don't think you have an eye for design, you may feel that you'll never create something high-quality enough for use in a classroom.
But what if we changed the conversation about what we mean by "high-quality"? David Wiley, co-founder of Lumen Learning and a key leader in the open education movement, writes in On Quality and OER:
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“….when publishers… say ‘quality’ with regard to textbooks and OER, they actually mean ‘presentation and graphic design’ – is the layout beautiful, are the images high resolution, are the headings used and formatted consistently, is the book printed in full color? But this is not what we should mean when we talk about quality. There can be one and only one measure of the quality of educational resources, no matter how they are licensed: How much do students learn when using the materials?” (Wiley, 2013) |
The concept of "ugly OER" (or "simple OER," if you prefer), embraces the idea that it's the content that makes something high-quality and it's the open license that makes it OER. Fancy graphics and nice font certainly look good, but they're just icing on the cake.
You can use simple, widely-available tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs to create "ugly" OER that can still have a big impact.
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Leadership and Management in Professional Nursing Practice by UNC Nursing professor Mike Aldridge was created using Microsoft Word and has been downloaded more than 13,000 times from users all over the world.
Magic in Europe from Ancient Greece to Enlightenment by UNC History professor Corinne Wieben was created using Google Docs and funded by a grant from the Colorado Department of Higher Education.
Colorado State University Pueblo has a full z-degree in Spanish, meaning Spanish majors don't pay anything for their course materials in their major. The curriculum is hosted on a WordPress site and uses Google Docs for many of the hands-on activities.
The concept of "Small and Ugly OER" was first introduced at the 2025 OER Deep Dive, a day-long professional development session for faculty funded with an OER grant from the Colorado Department of Higher Education. Materials from the Deep Dive are available in UNCOpen.
"Small and Ugly OER" by Nancy A. Henke is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0