Open Education (OE) Guide: How to...

1. Identify learning need: This is the motivation for searching, linked to goals and development needs. The starting point is always a defined learning need. In your work, this is a teacher’s learning need – that is, what they need to be able to do and know after the learning episode. (If you are working in a school, this learning need should relate to the school development plan that has been developed with the school management committee.)
2. Search for OER: Finding suitable OER to support development needs.
3. Select OER: Judging whether the OER are suitable for use and whether they can be adapted for the intended teaching and learning context.
4. Adapt/refine: Modifying the OER to use in context; refining it after evaluating its use to support learning.
5. Use in practice: Using the adapted resource in a teaching context.
6. Evaluate after use: Judging how well the OER has met the learning needs.
7. Share: Sharing the OER with your local community and wider. The local community might be teacher educators you work with, headteachers in your district, colleagues in another DIET or colleagues in your university. When you share the adapted OER, include notes on how the OER was used and its successes or otherwise in meeting the learning needs of the teachers.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. | Source: The Open University, Open Learn Create

Evaluating OERs

The same criteria you have used to evaluate your previous course materials are applicable to OERs. However, there are unique criteria you will want to consider when choosing OERs for your courses. This guide highlights three common OER evaluation criteria.

Quality

Accessibility

Copyright

But let the folks at Charles C. Sherrod Library from East Tennessee State University tell you more about quality, accessibility and copyright. 

source: Charles C. Sherrod Library

But before you do that, do you know you are the most qualified person to judge the quality of an OER? You are the subject expert so why wouldn't you be? You can read the same on Uof SC Library's OER LibGuide or you could begin to start evaluatiing by the criteria below: 

• Currency - Is the information current enough and is it relevant to your topic?
• Reliable - Where did the content come from? Is it lasting?
• Authority - Who wrote it? Can you trust the information?
• Accuracy – Can the content be verified? Is it factual and unbiased?
• Accessible – Does it pass accessibility checkers and is it accessible to screen readers?
• Purpose and Point of View – Is it fact, opinion or propaganda? Who is the audience?

Accessibility for OERs is a time-consuming process. NOT all OER resources are accessible. The creators of OER resources are getting better at developing accessible content. However you need to consider both both quality of content and accessibility features. 

• Access and OERs at MERLOT
• Accessibility for Open Educational Resources
• Accessibility and OERS from Open Washington: Open Educational Resources Network from the Washington State Community and Technical Colleges

Need Help? Please contact our Reference Librarian and Accessibility Advocate, Debbie Carney [debra.carney@bucks.edu] to help you with determining if an OER resource is accessible. 

When designing and compiling OERs for your students consider best practices in Universal Design for Learning for all students to have access to all materials. Browse through the Think-book to get a sense of how to take UDL into consideration.