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Open Educational Resources: Evaluating OERs

A guide to Open Educational Resources (OER) with tools and strategies to retrieve and create them

How to evaluate an OER

In order to offer a valid evaluation tool for Open Educational Resources, OER Commons has joint forces with Achieve, a non-profit organisation whose main purpose is improving college and career readiness in educational institutions. The final outcome of this cooperative effort has been an online evaluation tool, hosted now by OER Commons and fully integrated within both parties' resources. More information is available here.

The following is just a "skeleton" version of the set of rubrics from the tool, but it might still be useful to quickly evaluate an OER:

  • Rubric I. Degree of Alignment to Standards
  • Rubric II. Quality of Explanation of the Subject Matter
  • Rubric III. Utility of Materials Designed to Support Teaching
  • Rubric IV. Quality of Assessment
  • Rubric V. Quality of Technological Interactivity
  • Rubric VI. Quality of Instructional and Practice Exercises
  • Rubric VII. Opportunities for Deeper Learning
  • Rubric VIII. Assurance of Accessibility

Each rubric is to be evaluated independently and according to the following scores:

  • 3: Superior
  • 2: Strong
  • 1: Limited
  • 0: Very Weak / None
  • N/A: Rubric Not Applicable