Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Select and Evaluate OER

Evaluating OER for use in your class

When evaluating OER, you should consider:

Content (quality, accuracy, and currency)
Relevance to your class
Production quality
Technical capabilities and software
Interactivity and engagement
Accessibility of resources
Diversity and inclusion in the resource
Licenses/ability to adapt (if you're interested in customizing the resource)

The resources below provide additional details and can help you think through each of these criteria when evaluating OER.

Note: It's important to remember that Open Educational Resources (OER) can be just like their commercial counterparts except for the unrestricted access, sharing, and editing allowed by their open licenses. Thus, the process of selecting the right OER can be quite similar to how you're currently reviewing texts to make sure they're a good fit for your course.

Resources for Evaluating OER

Faculty Guide for Evaluating OER
A short checklist of suggested criteria from BCcampus. Reviews relevance, accuracy, production quality, accessibility, interactivity, and licensing.
OER Evaluation Criteria
A short checklist of suggested criteria from Affordable Learning Georgia. Reviews clarify, comprehensibility, and readability; current and technical accuracy; adaptability and modularity; appropriateness, accessibility; and supplementary resources.
Rubric for evaluating OER Objects
Detailed rubric from Achieve, a non-profit organization dedicated to raising graduation rates and getting students college and career-ready. Reviews alignment to standards, explanation of subject matter, design to support teaching, assessment, technical interactivity, exercises, opportunities for deeper learning, and accessibility.
Open Textbook Library Review Rubric
Overview of the 10 areas on which the Open Textbook Library asks reviewers to evaluate a open textbook.

Interactive Open Educational Resources by John D. Shank
ISBN: 9781118419670
Publication Date: 2013-12-13
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2014! Sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), this one-of-a-kind book demonstrates the best tools, resources, and techniques for discovering, selecting, and integrating interactive open educational resources (OERs) into the teaching and learning process. The author examines many of the best repositories and digital library websites for finding high quality materials, explaining in depth the best practices for effectively searching these repositories and the various methods for evaluating, selecting, and integrating the resources into the instructor's curriculum and course assignments, as well as the institution's learning management system.