Open Educational Resources (OER)

The Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) is the consortium of nonprofit academic libraries within the Commonwealth of Virginia. Members include all of the 39 state-assisted colleges and universities (the six doctoral universities, nine 4-year institutions, and 24 community and two-year branch colleges), as well as 31 of the independent (private, nonprofit) institutions and the Library of Virginia.

The goal of the VIVA Course Mapping Project is to support the discovery of Open Educational Resources (OER) aligned to Virginia courses. Recognizing that competing demands and time constraints present barriers to OER adoption for many instructors, the Course Mapping Project works to consolidate and align OER for high enrollment courses at Virginia higher education institutions.

The VIVA Faculty Textbook Portal is a catalog to assist Virginia public college and university faculty in finding and selecting open and affordable textbooks for their courses in one place. The Portal is part of a wide-scale Open and Affordable Initiative by VIVA to provide no-cost and barrier-free access to course curriculum resources for students and researchers. The Portal contains over 200,000 titles from VIVA’s shared library collections, open access textbooks, and ebooks available for VIVA to purchase on behalf of public colleges and universities throughout the state. Search the VIVA Faculty Textbook Portal below to explore this resource:

VIVA Open is an OER Commons hosted website that serves as a repository for open educational resources (OER) adopted, adapted, and/or created by faculty and higher education professionals at Virginia institutions, most notably through VIVA Open Grants and VIVA Adopts. To support faculty in the development of OER, the site also contains the VIVA Open Grants Hub. The hub provides a venue for collaboration through subject-specific groups as well as tools and training specific to working with the OER Commons authoring tool, module builder, permissions guide, and more. The VCCS Transfer Course Mapping Hub a listing of OER selected for high enrollment and Transfer Virginia courses. Institutional collections of OER adopted and tagged by the course are shared on the Virginia OER Adoptions hub. Finally, VIVA Open Curated Collections provides a listing of OER in a wide range of subjects.

VIVA Open Publishing is an Open and Affordable initiative providing centralized publishing services and support for VIVA member institution's library publishing programs utilizing the Pressbooks and VIVA Open publishing platforms.

The VCCS Transfer Course Mapping Hub provides a listing of OER selected and aligned specifically for VCCS transfer courses by librarians across the state. Since many of the transfer courses are high enrollment, general education courses, the selected OER may also be useful to equivalent courses offered at 4-year institutions. Curated OER are reviewed by Virginia faculty based on three indicators: the quality of the explanation of the subject matter, comprehensiveness, and cultural representation. Filter subject collection resources by Course Alignments to see resources aligned to VCCS courses.