Finding and Evaluating Open Educational Resources

One of the greatest obstacles to adopting open education resources is the time it takes to find and evaluate OER. This post provides advice for faculty on how to effectively search for and assess OER to make the process as easy as possible.

Prepare

Like most things in life, preparation is essential and will make searching for resources more efficient! There are few questions to consider before you start your search.

• What content are you looking for? Review the learning outcomes for your course and decide what topics from your curriculum to use for searching.
• What kind of material do you want to find? Do you want supplemental material like videos, quizzes, and slides? Do you need an entire textbook or do you think multiple resources could be used instead of a textbook? Is interactivity important to you?
• Do you want to use a standard assessment rubric so you can evaluate multiple sources using the same criteria? There a number of rubrics people have created to evaluate OER including: 
• iRubric: Evaluating OER rubric developed by Sarah Morehouse with help from Mark McBride, Kathleen Stone, and Beth Burns.
• Achieve’s OER rubrics, which can be used to evaluate the quality of OER and if an OER is in alignment with Common Core Standards.

Search

Luckily, there a number of OER repositories that have already been curated and include handy search and browse features that will make finding OER much easier than simply searching on the open web.

Large Repositories of OER:

• OER Commons
• Multimedia Educational Resource for Online Teaching and Learning (MERLOT)

Open Textbook Collections:

• Open Textbook Library is a list of open textbooks curated by the University of Minnesota. It includes helpful information like faculty reviews and the ability to browse by subjects.
• OpenStax College is a non-profit open textbook publishing company that is housed at Rice University.
• BC Campus Open Education Resources is a collection of open peer-reviewed textbooks created in British Columbia.
• Open SUNY Textbooks are a collection of textbooks written by SUNY affiliated professors and are sponsored and supported by the SUNY system.

Private-sector Collections:

• Lumen Learning is a private company founded in 2013 that helps faculty and institutions adopt OER
• Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working since 2008 to offer free and open online courses to all who want to learn.

What to Look For

Evaluating OER is not all that different from evaluating any other information source. There are a few key questions you’ll want to ask before you even open an OER that will help you determine the credibility.

• Author: Who is the creator of the OER? What is their academic affiliation and credentials? Is this person an expert on the topic or is it outside of their field of study? Is the OER published or sponsored by a university?
• Peer-review and Faculty Reviews: Is the OER peer-reviewed? Is there a statement that clearly indicates whether it is or is not peer-reviewed? Some OER collections like the Open Textbook Library include faculty ratings and reviews which can be helpful for determining quality.
• How is the OER licensed? Can it be remixed and reused or did the creator put a restrictive license on it?
• Has the OER been adopted by others in your field?
• Does the OER cite scholarly, peer-reviewed sources?
• Is it available in multiple formats or in an open format that can be easily transformed?

What to Avoid

There are a few red flags you should look out for when evaluating OER.

• It is not clear who created the OER and there is no institutional, non-profit, or private sector affiliation.
• There is no statement on peer-review so there is no way to know if it has been reviewed or not reviewed
• The OER is not clearly licensed and you’re not sure if or how it can be reused
• There are conflicting statements about how the resource is licensed
• There are basic spelling and grammatical errors
• There are no citations or sources

After you’ve done a basic evaluation, you can use a rubric to take a more in-depth look at the content and determine if it’s appropriate for your curriculum.

The Library Can Help!

Finally, remember that the library can help! The University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana has copyright experts, publishing specialists, and subject specialists that can help you identify, adopt, adapt, and publish OER.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License