One of the most powerful aspects of Open Educational Resources is the legal permission to adapt them to better serve your students and course objectives. Unlike traditional copyrighted materials that must be used “as-is,” OER can be customised to reflect your teaching style, local context, and students’ specific learning needs.

Customisation doesn’t require advanced technical skills or massive time investments. Even small adaptations can significantly improve how well resources serve your students, and the process becomes easier with practice.

Why this matters for you

When you can adapt resources rather than being constrained by what publishers provide, you have the flexibility to create learning materials that perfectly align with your course goals. This means better student engagement, more relevant examples, and the satisfaction of teaching with materials that truly reflect your expertise and values.

Why this matters for your students

Customised resources can include examples from their communities, reflect diverse perspectives, address their specific learning challenges, and connect course content to their career goals. Students benefit from materials designed specifically for their context rather than generic content created for an undefined audience.

Why Customise OER

Adaptation allows you to transform good resources into excellent ones that serve your specific teaching context. Unlike traditional copyrighted materials that must be used ‘as-is,’ open licensing gives you the freedom to modify resources to better fit your students’ needs and your teaching approach.

This addresses a common frustration many faculty experience: finding resources that are ‘almost perfect’ but don’t quite match your course sequence, student population, or local context. With OER, ‘almost perfect’ becomes ‘exactly what you need’ through thoughtful adaptation.

When considering how to customise OER, it’s helpful to think about two broad approaches to adaptation:

Improvement: This involves enhancing the resource’s overall quality, accuracy, and functionality to make it objectively better for any user.

Contextualisation: This involves adapting the resource to better fit your specific teaching environment, student population, and local context.

Both types of customisation are valuable and often overlap. Understanding this distinction helps you identify the most impactful changes to make for your specific situation.

Common Reasons for Adaptation

Alignment with Course Outcomes

Many existing OER cover similar topics but may not align perfectly with your specific learning objectives or the depth of coverage you need. Customisation allows you to emphasise certain concepts, reorganise content to match your course sequence, or adjust the level of complexity to fit your students’ preparation.

Cultural and Local Relevance

Resources created for broad audiences often lack examples, case studies, and perspectives that resonate with your specific student population. Canadian students benefit from content that reflects their legal system, healthcare context, cultural diversity, and economic realities rather than generic or American-focused examples.

Accessibility and Inclusion

You can improve existing resources by adding alternative text to images, creating simplified language versions, including diverse perspectives in examples, or providing content in multiple formats. These adaptations make learning more accessible for all students.

Currency and Accuracy

Open licensing allows you to update outdated information, correct errors, or incorporate recent developments in your field. This is particularly valuable in rapidly changing disciplines where traditional textbooks may lag behind current knowledge.

Enhanced Engagement

You can integrate multimedia elements, interactive components, or collaborative activities that transform passive reading into active learning experiences. This might include adding videos, embedding quizzes, or creating opportunities for student contribution.

Approaches to OER Customisation

Customisation exists on a spectrum from simple edits to comprehensive adaptations. Most faculty start with minor changes and gradually develop confidence for larger modifications.

Minor adaptations include:

• Correcting errors: Fix typos, broken links, or factual mistakes you discover
• Updating terminology: Replace outdated terms or adjust language for your audience
• Adding attribution: Include proper citations when combining multiple sources
• Format improvements: Enhance readability through better headings, spacing, or layout

Moderate revisions include:

• Reordering content: Restructure chapters or sections to match your course sequence
• Adding examples: Include local case studies, current events, or culturally relevant scenarios
• Simplifying language: Adjust reading level or explain technical terms for your student population
• Supplementing content: Add missing topics or expand sections that need more depth

Comprehensive Adaptations include:

• Combining multiple OER: Create a customised textbook using chapters from different sources
• Localising extensively: Replace most examples and references with Canadian or regional content
• Collaborative creation: Work with students to develop new sections, activities, or assessments
• Format transformation: Convert static content into interactive or multimedia experiences

Localisation for Canadian and BC Context

Adapting OER for Canadian students involves contextualizing content to reflect local examples and perspectives, such as:

• Including Canadian case studies, statistics, and examples
• Referencing Canadian laws, regulations, and institutional frameworks
• Using culturally responsive language and diverse perspectives
• Highlighting contributions from Canadian scholars and Indigenous knowledge systems
• Addressing local issues and contexts relevant to your students

Localising content helps students see the relevance of their learning to their own lives and communities.

Co-Creation and Student Involvement

One of the most powerful approaches to OER customisation involves students as collaborators in the adaptation process. Students increasingly show interest in adopting active, participatory roles that allow collaborative work with educators (Dollinger et al., 2018), and whole-class co-creation can transform teaching and learning practices, reaching greater numbers of students with more democratic forms of education (Bovill, 2020).

• Identifying examples from their communities or workplaces that illustrate course concepts
• Suggesting clarifications for confusing sections or technical terms
• Creating study guides or review materials for future students
• Developing practice questions and case studies based on their understanding
• Bringing diverse perspectives that enhance content relevance and accessibility

Challenging, open, and complex group tasks requiring students to create something new and original evoke effective collaboration (Scager et al., 2016). This collaborative approach introduces students as partners in their education and creates opportunities for deeper engagement with course content—ideas we’ll explore more deeply in upcoming sections on open pedagogy.

Common Concerns and Clarifications

Moving from selecting published materials to actively adapting them represents both a practical and psychological shift—you’re becoming a creator and curator rather than just a consumer of educational content. Faculty considering this transition often encounter both misconceptions about the technical skills required and legitimate questions about time investment, quality control, and when adaptation is worth the effort. Let’s address both:

“I’m not tech-savvy enough to customise OER effectively.”
Most meaningful OER adaptations require only basic digital literacy skills like word processing, copying and pasting, and simple formatting. Start with text-based changes using familiar tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Many successful adaptations involve no more technical complexity than editing any document you might create for your courses.

“How do I know if my changes actually improve the resource for students?”
Start with small, targeted changes based on specific problems you’ve observed with existing materials. Ask students for feedback about clarity, relevance, and engagement. You can also pilot adapted sections with one class before implementing changes broadly. The beauty of open licensing is that you can continue refining based on what you learn.

“What if I make mistakes or my adaptations aren’t good enough to share?”
Remember that adaptation is an iterative process—you can continue improving over time. Start by adapting resources for your own use without worrying about sharing them. Many faculty find that even imperfect adaptations serve their students better than perfect resources that don’t quite fit their context. You maintain control over what you share and when.

“How much time does customisation actually take, and is it worth the effort?”
Simple adaptations like updating examples or fixing errors can be done in minutes during your normal course preparation. More substantial changes might take a few hours initially but save time in subsequent semesters. Consider starting with small changes that address your biggest frustrations with existing materials—these often provide the most immediate value for minimal time investment.

“What about copyright and attribution when I’m combining multiple sources?”
Open licensing makes this much simpler than traditional copyright permissions. Most OER require only basic attribution (author, title, source, licence), and you can combine resources with compatible licences. When in doubt, document your sources clearly and choose resources with CC BY or CC BY-SA licenses for maximum flexibility. The KPU Library can help with attribution questions if needed.

Reflective Activity

Moving Forward

Customising OER transforms you from a consumer of educational content into a creator and curator who actively shapes learning materials to serve your students better. This process doesn’t require becoming a technology expert—it requires recognizing opportunities to improve student learning through thoughtful adaptation.

The goal isn’t to create perfect resources immediately, but to develop confidence in making targeted improvements that address your students’ specific needs. Each small adaptation builds your skills and understanding while creating materials that better reflect your teaching expertise and student context.

Next, we’ll explore how to implement OER in your courses, reflect on their impact, and develop sustainable practices for ongoing use and improvement.

REFERENCES

Bovill, C. (2020). Co-creation in learning and teaching: The case for a whole-class approach in higher education. Higher Education, 79, 1023–1037. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00453-w

Dollinger, M., Lodge, J., & Coates, H. (2018). Co-creation in higher education: Towards a conceptual model. Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 28(2), 210-231. https://doi.org/10.1080/08841241.2018.1466756

Scager, K. Boonstra,J., Peeters, T., Vilperhorst, J., & Wiegant, F. (2016). Collaborative learning in higher education: Evoking positive interdependence. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 15(4), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-07-0219