Hiram College Library: Open Educational Resources (OER) Information: Adopt and Evaluate OER

How do I Adopt an Open Educational Resource?

Provide your students an alternative to paid course materials by following these steps:

Find the right OER for your subject. Check out the resources on the Finding OER page. Ask a librarian if you need additional suggestions for locations to search. If no OER are available, you may also request that the library check to see whether we can purchase texts for your course as an eBook accessible to all.
Search for the appropriate textbooks on these various websites for your course.
Review and evaluate the textbooks based on the content and whether it suits your teaching style and your students. See the box that outlines evaluation criteria. To record your evaluation, you can also print and download this adoption worksheet from the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources.
Decide if you want to use the textbook as is, edit, or modify the contents. One of the benefits of open textbooks is flexibility to customize them for specific course designs as much or as little as you desire. If you want to make edits or append content, make sure the licensing allows that. Different repositories will have different options for editing and publishing revised copies.
Select the best format to distribute to your class such as online, or downloadable PDF and then distribute.

Screening for Biased Content in Instructional Materials
The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction released this model tool for screening for biased content in the hope that it will provide suggestions and examples for review teams during the instructional materials selection and adoption process.
BC OER Repository rubric
provide a process of evaluating open education resource repositories. There are numerous sources of open education materials available; however, understanding which spaces to begin searching for these materials can be daunting. The rubric was developed to evaluate open education resources repositories (OERR) in the following areas: Authority, Audience, Access & Diversity, User-friendliness, Subject Coverage, Search Functionality & Browsing, Media Type, Licensing & Permissions.
Faculty Checklist for Evaluating Course Materials
Checklist for Faculty evaluating course materials created by Open Oregon.

A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of postsecondary students
A study of 16,000 students across 10 institutions compares several measures of student academic success between those using open textbooks and those using traditional textbooks.

Comprehensiveness

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

Content Accuracy

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.

Clarity

The text is written in lucid, accessible prose, and provides adequate context for any jargon/technical terminology used.

Consistency

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.

Organization/Structure/Flow

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

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.

This rubric was developed by BCcampus. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license