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Open Educational Resources

This guide provides a basic understanding of Open Educational Resources (OER), including how to find, evaluate, and use OER materials for your own curriculum.

Evaluation Process

Here are a few steps you might take in the evaluation process. If this process seems lengthy, think about the process you follow to review textbooks and other materials for your course. You can use a similar or modified evaluation process.

  1. Does this OER cover the content you'd like your students to learn in this course or module?
  2. How accessible is this content? Will it be accessible for your students, or is it too technical? Or is it robust and challenging enough for your students?
  3. How can you use the content? Verify the license that the resource is under. Can you remix or revise the OER as long as it isn't for commercial purposes? Who do you have to recognize if you use it? Will you be able to do so? For more help with this, please contact the library.
  4. Once you determine how you can use the OER, what would you like to do with it? Does only a portion of it apply to your class? Would you possibly want to combine this OER with another OER or resource? Does the library have access to articles that could act as supplemental readings? 
  5. As you collect more OER and other resources, save them in a central location. Take note of how you envision using them. Align these resources with the learning objectives and weekly lessons on your syllabus in order to identify gaps. 

Evaluation Rubrics, Checklist and Tool

Achieve.org has developed eight OER rubrics as well as an evaluation tool to help users determine the degree of alignment of OER to the Common Core State Standards, and aspects of quality of OER.

This 2-page rubric is a synthesis version of the eight (8) separate rubrics for the evaluation of OERs created by ACHIEVE.org. It is meant as a ready reference for quick evaluation of an OER.

Credit: Created and shared by Rodney Birch of George Fox University

This handbook will guide a user through the process of evaluating an online resources using Achieve OER Evaluation Tool, which is hosted on OERCommons.org.

Questions to ask about the OER you are thinking of using. This rubric is developed by Sarah Morehouse with help from Mark McBride, Kathleen Stone, and Beth Burns is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

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