Whether planning on adopting single OERs to supplement a lecture, or adopting an entirely new textbook in the classroom, the following steps are important to making sure students have access to the best resources available to support your instruction.
Explore your options for incorporating open resources into your class. What are your end goals? Do you want to completely replace the textbook? Are you looking for interactive tools to supplement your instruction and the text? What are the important concepts and topics that you need to cover? How do you want to lay out the content? What format works best for your students?
The best places to start are your current syllabus, textbook, and supplemental resources.
Once you've found some potential candidates for inclusion in your course, the difficult work begins - evaluation.
There are many evaluation tools available to help with the process. A few a listed below.
Whether creating original content, compiling supplemental sources, or replacing a textbook, it is impossible to fully gauge the success of a resource until it is used in class.
The Finding OER and OER by Subject sections of this site offer a jumping off point for the discovery of Open Resources that may be appropriate for classroom use. Open resources range from lesson plans and classroom activities to textbooks and primary source materials. SC4 librarians are available to assist faculty in the discovery of resources.
In the search for open resources you may discover that exactly what you need does not exist. This presents an opportunity for creation of original materials for classroom use and sharing.
There are as many ways to organize course content and platforms on which to do so as there courses to create content for. The library can currently support faculty members by creating a course guide, assisting in the addition of resources and maintenance of links, provide access and training to faculty members to maintain their own course content. A course site can be as simple as a list of videos and articles to watch, or as complicated as creating a detailed multi-page course guide featuring lecture notes, online tutorials, interactive learning tools. The Center for eLearning is also an excellent support resource for assistance in organizing lesson plans and resources.
Open The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science by 
Interactive Open Educational Resources by
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2014! Sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), this one-of-a-kind book demonstrates the best tools, resources, and techniques for discovering, selecting, and integrating interactive open educational resources (OERs) into the teaching and learning process. The author examines many of the best repositories and digital library websites for finding high quality materials, explaining in depth the best practices for effectively searching these repositories and the various methods for evaluating, selecting, and integrating the resources into the instructor's curriculum and course assignments, as well as the institution's learning management system.
