LibGuides: Open Educational Resources : Finding/Evaluating/Using OER

So you have decided to investigate further, are considering reusing "as is" OER, remixing or revising an existing OER for your course, or you're thinking about publishing your own (we'll discuss revising, remixing, and creating OER in the next section). This section will help you find preexisting OER and guide you through their evaluation for reuse or modification as well as reuse.

Finding OER

OER Portals | Courses | Textbooks | Books & Other materials | Multimedia

Use these links to find existing OER. Note: This list is not exhaustive, but provides links to some of the best resources available. Many colleges and universities also provide free access to OER repositories containing material produced through those institutions.

OER Portals

The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) allows you to search for OER content across a number of repositories all at once, from George Mason University Libraries.
- Repositories include: AMSER (Applied Math and Science Education Repository), BCcampus: Open Ed, Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), LibreTexts, MERLOT, MIT OpenCourseWare, OAOpen.org, OASIS, OER Commons, OERs at Internet Archive, Open Michigan, Open Textbook Library, and Teaching Commons.
- Also: American Memory (Library of Congress), Digital Public Library of America, HathiTrust, JSTOR Open Access books, Library of Congress, Open Research Library, Project Gutenberg, The New York Public Library Digital Collections, and World Digital Library.
MERLOT provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools.
OASIS searches open content from 115 different sources and contains 408,199 records.
OER by Discipline Directory is a reference of OER listed by subject area and discipline.
OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources.
OERs at Internet Archive contains OER, plus university lectures, free courses, and supplemental materials from universities in the US and China.
ResearchGate makes global science research available for all.
Serendipity provides a Linked OpenCourseWare Data Faceted Search to connect and browse many different, widely-spread repositories.
The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities ... including open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.

Courses

edX offers high-quality online courses from top institutions who share their commitment to excellence in teaching and learning.
Khan Academy offers free courses and course materials to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.
LearnOutLoud Free Courses Collection has free college level courses from top universities.
Lumen Learning's OER course materials include text, images, videos, assessments, directed feedback, practice questions, simulations, and other interactives.
MIT OpenCourseWare provides courses, materials, and teaching resources, including "free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required."

Textbooks

BCcampus: Open Ed: Find textbooks and full course material packages.
LibreTexts: Global online OER textbook platform. City Colleges of Chicago's repository service.
OpenStax: Free textbooks. Low-cost technology. Includes LMS integration tools, test banks, answer guides, and Powerpoint slides.
Open Textbook Library textbooks are free to use and distribute, and are licensed to be freely adapted or changed with proper attribution.

Books and Other materials

Digital Public Library of America provides free access to millions of materials from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the country in one place.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited collections published under an open access license.
HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items.
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
JSTOR Open Access books contains more than 10,000 Open Access books from 125+ publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, De Gruyter, and University of California Press.
Library of Congress
The New York Public Library Digital Collections
OAOpen.org works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books.
Open Research Library is planned to include all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform.
Pressbooks Directory is a free, searchable catalog that includes over 5,000 open access books published by Pressbooks.
Project Gutenberg contains over 70,000 free eBooks including the world's great literature, with a "focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired."
World Digital Library Collection (Library of Congress) "contains cultural heritage materials" from Library of Congress collections and global partner organizations.

Multimedia

LearnOutLoud's Video and Audio Directory offers over 10,000 free educational audio and video titles.
Pexels has free stock photos, royalty free images, and videos.
TED-Ed provides access to education-related TED-Ed animations and TED Talks.
Unsplash: All photos can be downloaded and used for free.
Wikimedia Commons is a collection of 94,056,769 freely usable media files.
YouTube/EDU is YouTube's learning channel, containing educational videos.

Evaluating OER

There are many lenses for evaluating OER, just as there are with evaluating any other course materials. No matter where you are with OER, begin by considering the following:

What kind of material are you looking for? Full textbook, individual lesson plan, reading, something else?
What SLOs do you want the material to support?
How, and in what context, will you use the material you select?
How will students use and engage with the material?
How do these materials relate to the themes of DEI and social justice?
Is there an existing OER out there that you can use or remix?

Here are a few useful tools for evaluating OER, including for ADA compliance and DEI content:

Acheive.org. (n.d.). Rubrics for Evaluating Open Education Resource (OER) Objects. Achieve.org. 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.
ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative. (n.d.). Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism (IDEA) Audit Framework 9-28-21 Version 1. The ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative's Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism (IDEA) Framework was created to support faculty as they implement a culturally responsive and anti-racist pedagogy.
COOL4Ed. (n.d.). COOL4Ed eTextbook Accessibility Reviews. California Open Online Library for Education. COOL4Ed (the California Open Online Library for Education) was created so that faculty can easily find, adopt, utilize, review and/or modify free and open eTextbooks for little or no cost. The COOL4Ed accessibility open textbook evaluations can inform faculty, staff, and students how the free and open eTextbooks meet 15 accessibility “checkpoints” that could impact the learning of learners with a range of disabilities. The California State University and MERLOT has designed a framework that will provide the accessibility community a systematic and easy-to-use method to evaluate the accessibility of COOL4Ed resources. This framework was designed to enable the accessibility community to be able to quickly ascertain useful and quality information concerning digital course materials so they will usable by all students irrespective of disability status. These methods can be used by publishers to improve the accessibility of their eTextbooks, and by faculty and students in their selection of eTextbooks.
Morehouse, S. (n.d.). iRubric: Evaluating OER rubric. RCampus. 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.
University of Illinois Library. (n.d.). OER Evaluation Checklist. A one-page checklist. Document note: This resource was reused and adapted from Kirkwood Community College Library's guide on open textbooks. It was developed by Sarah Crissinger, Information Literacy Graduate Assistant. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
WebAIM. (n.d.). Checklist for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. Institute for Disability Research, Policy, and Practice. Utah State University. This is not a comprehensive policy checklist, but presents our recommendations for implementing accessibility principles and techniques for those seeking WCAG conformance. The language used here significantly simplifies and condenses the official WCAG 2.1 specification and supporting materials to make it easier to implement and verify for web pages.
Wiley, D. (2019). The OER Adoption Impact Calculator, version 1.2. The OER Adoption Impact Calculator, version 1.2 helps you understand many of the potential impacts of adopting OER instead of traditionally copyrighted learning materials.
Zhadko, O. & Ko, S. (2019, August 27). Evaluation and Selection Criteria for OER. City University of New York. (1-page). This list of criteria is suitable for any type of OER, including an open textbook or individual OER artifacts/objects. This guide is intended for individual faculty or those supporting them. Not all criteria will apply in every case, but the criteria can serve as a general framework for the evaluation and selection process. Depending on the subject or course material you already have, or what you are seeking, one or more of these criteria may be more important or have greater priority.
[OER]. Coolidge, A., Doner, S., Robertson, T., & Gray, J. (2018). Accessibility toolkit – 2nd edition. BCcampus. [OER] The goal of the Accessibility Toolkit - 2nd Edition is to provide resources for each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open textbook—one that is free and accessible for all students. This is a collaboration between BCcampus, Camosun College, and CAPER-BC.
[OER]. Open Education Network. (n.d.). Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in OER Rubric. Open Oregon Educational Resources. [OER] This is a public, living document. Comments and contributions are welcomed. The guide was designed as a tool to be used as well as to complement a community inventory of OER materials that rate highly on the rubric.
[OER]. BCampus OER Production Team. (2021). Diverse and Inclusive Representation in OER. In Getting Started: OER Publishing at BCcampus. BCcampus. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind to ensure that the content of your OER is both diverse and inclusive.
Grunzke, R.Z., Jiles, T. Mayo, S., Grotewold, K., & Ianniello, P. (2021.) Equity Rubric for OER Evaluation. Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity. The BranchED Equity Rubric for OER Evaluation is intended for use by teacher educators to evaluation instructional materials for equity.

Using Existing OER

If you will be using all or part of an OER or remixing an OER, in addition to the above criteria consider:

BEFORE

Authority: what is the creator's expertise and credibility? Is bias present?
How well is the material researched and information communicated? How does it fit in with larger conversations?
How current, innovative, original, etc. is the material? Will it add value to the class?
What supplemental materials (quizzes, tests, other modules), if any, are available with the OER? How will you incorporate them if you use them?
How will students engage with the material?
Is the material easily accessible to students? Is it ADA compliant? (Use tools in the previous section to assess).
Which Creative Commons Licenses (CCLs) are assigned to the material?

DURING/AFTER

How was your experience using the OER? What were pros and cons? Would you use the resource again?
How did students respond to the material? Use surveys, discussions, or focus groups to learn student preferences.