For telling UMMS faculty how and where to publish their OER

Dear Dr. [name],

I am delighted to hear that you're interested in publishing [name of materials].

I work with our Open.Michigan team to publish open educational resources (OER) developed by U-M faculty, staff, and students under a Creative Commons license. This "some rights reserved" status allows people around the world to view, re-distribute, and adapt the resources. The basic outline of our process is at https://open.umich.edu/share.

One of the most exciting parts of our work is sharing these resources with the world. We promote the content through the Open.Michigan Educational Resources website (http://open.umich.edu/education) as well as a number of our favorite content sharing sites (http://open.umich.edu/share/share). We also collaborate with several health science institutions in Africa as part of our African Health OER Network Project (http://www.oerafrica.org/healthoer/). Some of these platforms also have comments and star ratings for users to provide feedback. Through these distribution methods, we help faculty increase the visibility of their teaching materials.

I would recommend three websites, in particular, for you to promote your [materials]:

1. MedEd Portal (http://www.aamc.org/mededportal) -This is the central site for peer-reviewed Medical and dental education resources.

2. Blip.tv (http://blip.tv/) - This is the best one-stop website for distributing online video. If you upload your video there, it will automatically be distributed to a number of other networks, including YouTube, Internet Archive, Vimeo, iTunesU (see full list http://blip.tv/faq#distribution). You only have to upload the video once but it appears on a number of websites.

3. Open.Michigan (http://open.umich.edu/education/med) - Once you publish your resource(s) on one of these other websites, we would like to represent it on the Open.Michigan website. We would simply add a brief description and a link to your resource. For an example, here are some case studies from dentistry that were published on MedEd Portal: http://open.umich.edu/education/dent/resources/health-case-studies/2009

I hope that's helpful. If you have any questions, I would be happy to meet with you to discuss this further.