Before you choose a tool to use: remember to think about the materials you're already using in your teaching: what formats do you use and how easy would it be to convert those materials to open resources? . Your text-based teaching materials should be in an accessible and editable format like Rich Text File (.rtf), although most word processing packages can open documents written on different programs. When creating video, use the .mp4 format, as that is used by more video players and platforms.
Most educational resources today are “born digital,” meaning they are created as digital files - "soft copies" before they are printed - "hard copies" Because of this, you don't necessarily need anything special to create OERs; there is a wide variety of software you can use.Do however think about how easy it is to share the content you create with proprietary tools
See the Links page for links to other tools and also some useful OER creation guides
Some things to consider before you start:
You can create simple text OERs using word processing software such as Microsoft Word. These can easily be converted to PDFs, although PDF is not perhaps the easiest file format to edit. Libre Office is a good open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Its file format, .odt, can be read by Microsoft Word and vice versa (though there may be slight formatting differences). HTML, for web display, is a good format to use,
Smartphones come equipped with equipped with cameras that can record video quite adequately. There are plenty of decent audio recording apps extant too.Video and audio editing software will be needed.
Audacity is a good open source audio editing tool, while Shotcut and OpenShot are excellent open-source video editors. Dotsub offers browser-based video subtitling.
Screencast-O-Matic is a well-regarded and well-used freemium screen recorder
As with video, smartphones will take perfectly good pictures. For image manipulation, GIMP and GIMPshop are recommended. The former is open source image editing application, while the latter is built using the GIMP engine but behaves more like PhotoShop. GIMPshop has not beenoffically updated since 2007 so GIMP may be a better option.Inkscape can be used to edit PDFs, but is more at home creating and editing vector graphics.
Many OER sites and repositories offer OER authoring tools of some description. Some free tools include:
Other platforms do exist; for example, Softchalk Cloud but more likely are subscription-based.
Two issues to consider:
