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Open Educational Resources

This guide provides an introduction to Open Educational Resources (OERs); where to find them; and how to get started in publishing OERs

How to evaluate OERs

Finding and evaluating OER (Open Educational Resources)
University of Rochester
22 Dec 2020 (Duration: 1h)
Highlights: 

  • Open access versus OER
  • Ebook licensing & access
  • What is replaceable
    In this one hour workshop, you will learn where to find and how to evaluate OER materials based on their needs (textbooks or additional reading materials, images, lessons, and other course materials, etc.). The discussion will include common challenges to incorporating OER into courses, mapping repositories to needs, licensing and copyright, and usability and accessibility.

As OERs may differ in terms of quality, it is important for you to evaluate the resources before using them in class. 

Here are some recommendations to consider when choosing resources:

CONTENT
Comprehensiveness
Does the material cover the subjects you teach? The text should cover all areas and ideas of the subject appropriately and provides an effective index and/or glossary.

Accuracy
Is the content accurate and free of major errors and spelling mistakes? Content should be accurate, error-free and unbiased.

Relevance/Longevity
Content is up-to-date, but not in a way that will make the text obsolete within a short period of time. The text is written and/or arranged in such a way that necessary updates will be relatively easy and straightforward to implement.

Clarity
Is it clearly written and at a level appropriate for your students? The text should be written in clear and accessible prose, and provides adequate context for any jargon/technical terminology used.

Consistency
The text is internally consistent in terms of terminology and framework.

Organization
The topics in the text are presented in a logical, clear fashion.

Grammatical Errors
The text contains no grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance
The text is not culturally insensitive or offensive in any way. It should make use of examples that are inclusive of a variety of races, ethnicities, and backgrounds.

  

Adapted from:

You are expected to comply with University policies and guidelines namely, Appropriate Use of Information Resources Policy, IT Usage Policy and Social Media Policy. Users will be personally liable for any infringement of Copyright and Licensing laws.
Unless otherwise stated, all guide content is licensed by CC BY-NC 4.0.