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Open Educational Resources (OER): Evaluating Open Educational Resources

Evaluating Open Educational Resources

It is crucial to evaluate any educational resources for quality. The Open Educational Resources (OER), just like traditional textbooks, can be assessed for quality. Assessing OER for quality is the only way faculty can tell if these resources are high quality and meet the learning goals for their course.

To evaluate OER follow these procedures:

  1. Check if the OER contain the materials students should be learning in your course.

  2. Consider how accessible the material is for the students. 

  3. Check for the license type used for the resource. Consider the following:

  • Can you retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the resource?

  1. Look for OER textbook reviews. For instance on BCcampus, reviewed textbooks have a score. The reviews and scores are posted along with the textbook making it easy for faculty assess that resource's quality.

  2. Some OER have built in analytics that allow the users to improve the resource. For instance, OpenStax and Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative (OLI) have such analytics in the OER.

  3. Conduct end-of-class surveys to assess if students were satisfied with the OER used in their course.

For more information on accessing and evaluating OER please contact your subject librarian.