When evaluating OERs for adoption and customization, considerations include relevant content, production quality, licencing, and accessibility and inclusion. You may want to develop your own assessment checklist as you evaluate OERs, tailored to your course's needs, discipline, and students. Alongside best practices for accessibility, here are some examples to help you consider criteria for evaluation:
You have started to look for potentially relevant OER and have found several contenders. This evaluation checklist includes five consideration areas: 1) relevance and coverage, 2) licensing, 3) accuracy, 4) production quality, 5) diversity, inclusion, and accessibility. It is meant to provide ideas on whether and how you might adopt or customize existing OER.
Open Textbook Library Review Rubric: A list of OER review criteria from the University of Minnesota's Open Textbook Library.
Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Education Resources: checklist from Canada's BCOER, a group of librarians in British Columbia.
Open Textbook Adoption Worksheet: worksheet was developed by Dr. Judy Baker, Director of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER).
Achieve OER Rubrics: rubrics for evaluating OERs from the nonprofit Achieve.
Assessing Visual Materials for Diversity & Inclusivity: framework with helpful questions for assessing diversity and inclusion while avoiding stereotyping and tokenization. Resource modified by Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity (BranchED).
Accessibility best practices improve the quality and inclusivity of OER, including open textbooks that you are either adopting, customizing, or creating as well as existing OER that you are reviewing.
Authors: Amanda Coolidge; Sue Doner; Tara Robertson; and Josie Gray
Title: Accessibility Toolkit – 2nd Edition
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0
View Appendix A: Checklist for Accessibility
@Concordialib on Instagram
@Concordialib on Twitter
OER Concordia University Library Guide was developed and redesigned by Rachel Harris. Source. CC BY 4.0. Except where otherwise noted content on this guide is licenced under a Creative Commons 4.0. International licence. Icons by The Noun Project. Special thanks to Chloe Lei for the previous pilot version of the OER pages and Pamela Carson for web-design consultations.
© Concordia University