Using OER
Criteria for Selecting OER
As the world of open educational resources continually evolves, it can be difficult to know if you're implementing material that truly meets your standards. Here are some useful things to consider when selecting Open Education Resources to adapt and adopt, in addition to the 5Rs (retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute):
- Accuracy / Quality of Content
- Relevance (SLO, Articulation)
- Production Quality and Ease of Adaptability
- Accessibility
- Interactivity
- Cultural Relevance & Sensitivity
- Licensing
Accessibility
These resources on accessibility may be helpful when considering adopting or adapting OER for your courses. Also seek help from De Anza's Instructional Design team.
- Basics of Accessibility - https://asccc-oeri.org/accessibility/ - Recent write-up from ASCCC
- OEI Accessibility How-To Webinars - tips for designing an accessible online course
- W3C Web Accessibility Principles - by the Web Accessibility Initiative
- WebAim: WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool - enter a URL to test a site for accessibility
- WebAim. Designing for Screen Reader Compatibility
Licensing
As stated above, it is important is to check for copyright and licenses of material you find. For a brief overview of Copyright, Public Domain and Creative Commons Licenses, check out these videos.
Evaluating OER
Using rubrics or other evaluative tools to measure effectiveness, accessibility and alignment to student learning outcomes is key. Listed below are several examples of rubrics, some designed to evaluate overall OER courses and others for individual OER course materials.
- Open Textbooks Evaluation Criteria - an Open Textbook evaluation criteria checklist developed by The College Open Textbooks Collaborative
- OER Evaluation Criteria - a six-component checklist for evaluating OER from Affordable Learning Georgia
- Achieve OER Rubrics - eight rubrics developed by Achieve.org to help users determine the degree of alignment of Open Educational Resources (OER) to college- and career-ready standards.
- iRubric: Evaluating OER rubric - developed by Sarah Morehouse with help from Mark McBride, Kathleen Stone, and Beth Burns; licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
OER Community
You may also want to talk to other faculty in your discipline to share ideas and concerns. Here are some forums to collaborate with peers using OER.