Aim and background: The aim of this study was to investigate students' attitudes, rationales, and approaches to making open educational resource (OER) videos (a form of OERs) on sustainable development (SD) in order to identify students' competencies and effective pedagogical designs. Method: Students registering for a teacher training course were invited to design and create pedagogies, make OER videos, and share the videos on YouTube on five SD topics: sustainable lifestyle, campus, community, enterprise, and earth development. The students provided their weekly journals and a final reflection on the whole process of making the OER videos on SD. This study used qualitative data analysis and text mining methodologies to analyse students' process data of making OER videos on SD. Results and discussion: The analysis results revealed that making OER videos on SD needed students' ideational, inquiry, societal, and disciplinary competencies. Inferred pedagogical suggestions for practitioners to support students in making digital products on SD are to follow a linear pathway from ideational creation, inquiry process, societal transformation, to transdisciplinary reflection.