Resource
AI + OER Case Studies: A DOERS Project
AI + OER Case Studies is an open anthology edited by Kathy Essmiller and published by Oklahoma State University Libraries in 2026, collecting eleven cases on where generative AI meets open educational resources in higher education. It grew out of a 2025 report for DOERS, Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success, a consortium of 45 higher-education systems covering more than 1,000 colleges.
What you can do with it
Read it as a set of project accounts rather than an evaluation. The book runs in three parts, Shared Values, Shared Practice and Shared Future, and the editor maps each chapter onto one of four policy priorities from the earlier report: centering students, engaging critically with generative AI, keeping policy pedagogically driven, and attending to all learners. Chapters include the City University of New York's route from a planned policy to published guidelines for generative AI in OER creation, constrained by a federated campus structure and a union contract; a human-in-the-loop revision of an open technical-communication textbook; co-creating institutional AI policy with students; and system-wide professional development across AI and OER. It ships as a Pressbooks book with EPUB, PDF and XHTML downloads.
Who it is for
Policy staff and library OER leads drafting guidance for a whole system, AI literacy coordinators planning professional development, and instructors or course designers adapting a textbook or a writing assignment. Each chapter was peer reviewed by invited scholars, and the cases were chosen for implications beyond one course.
Notes and caveats
Chapter licensing is the trap. The collection is CC BY 4.0, but individual authors retain copyright and chose their own Creative Commons licenses, so a chapter can be more restrictive than the book page suggests; the textbook-revision chapter is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, and reuse has to check the chapter rather than the front matter. Authors had no required AI disclosure procedure, so most chapters discuss their process in passing, generally following the OER Commons guidance. By editorial choice each chapter keeps its author's disciplinary voice, punctuation and regional spelling, so the prose does not read uniformly. Above all, every chapter documents one local project and no two share an instrument or a comparison, so the volume offers practice to adapt rather than evidence to cite.