Open Educational Resources: Evaluate OER

Creator Credibility & User Reviews
Information about creator education and affiliation as well as a peer and/or user reviews are often provided within OER collections to consider during evaluation. 

Content Accuracy
Content is accurate, error-free, and unbiased.

Comprehensiveness
The text covers all areas and ideas of the subject appropriately and provides an effective index and/or glossary.

Relevance Longevity
Content is up-to-date, but not in a way that will quickly 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.

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.

Clarity
The text is written in lucid, 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 Structure Flow
The topics in the text are presented in a logical, clear fashion.

Modularity
The text is easily and readily divisible into smaller reading sections that can be assigned at different points within the course (i.e., enormous blocks of text without subheadings should be avoided). The text should not be overly self-referential, and should be easily reorganized and realigned with various subunits of a course without presenting much disruption to the reader.

Interface
The text is free of significant interface issues, including navigation problems, distortion of images/charts, and any other display features that may distract or confuse the reader.

Grammatical Errors
The text contains no grammatical errors.

This content was developed as a derivative of BCcampus, which is a derivative of the Peer Review criteria used by Saylor.org, which is a derivative of the review rubric used by College Open Textbooks, which was adapted from the American Library Association Choice Selection Policy.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Open Education Resource Repository (OERR) Rubric 
Developed by the BCOEL Group (British Columbian Open Education Librarians) to provide a process of evaluating open education resource repositories.
 

Evaluating Resources from Affordable Learning Georgia 
Adopting, modifying, or creating an open textbook for your course is a big decision, requiring you to evaluate new resources often on your own. Because of this, Affordable Learning Georgia has created a list of criteria for evaluating OER.
 

Achieve Open Educational Resource (OER) Rubrics 
This site includes a handbook, videos and set of presentation slides that give instructions on how to apply the rubrics and use the online tool, as well as examples of what different ratings mean under each rubric. The information included in in the handbook, videos and slides is meant to mirror one another, with specific examples included in the handbook and slides.