Teaching With Open Educational Resources

Finding and Assessing Open Educational Resources

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section you will be able to...

  • Find Open Educational Resources
  • Assess the quality of Open Educational Resources
  • Assess if Open Educational Resources are accessible for all students

Overview

There are more than a billion CC-licensed works on the web. Fortunately, there are many platforms that allow Creative Commons licensed works to be stored and accessed. After you have found OER that you would like to adopt in your course it's important that you assess the quality of the resources.

This section will provide you with a list of online repositories for finding OER and tools to asses their quality.

Open Courses

Open Course Library - A collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts. Maintained by Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.

SUNY OER Read-to-Adopt Courses lists complete courses for higher education. New York State students can complete the courses online. Outside of this region only course materials and outcomes can be accessed for free, but materials are licensed under the Creative Commons for reuse.

Open Materials

OER Commons offers over 160,000 OER easily searchable by refinable topics including subject areas, education levels, material type and media formats for all levels of education. You can also build and store your own modules.

OpenEd CUNY  is a curated digital library of open educational resources from the City University of New York. Browse collections or use their resource and module builders to create your own.

Open Library is a searchable repository of programs, courses, materials and resources supported by eCampus Ontario. Many of the textbooks offered have been reviewed and vetted by educators across Canada.

SOL*R Sharable Online Learning Resources is a BCcampus collection that provides guest access for browsing and downloading its Creative Commons licensed resources.

Merlot II A curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.

Open Textbooks

OpenStax Textbooks is a nonprofit initiative from Rice University that publishes a collection of high-quality textbooks for high-enrollment courses like math, science, business, history, economics, and sociology.

BC Campus OpenEd lets you search for quality open textbooks offered in a variety of digital formats; the first step in adopting open educational resources. Search by subject and download them to your computer.

OpenTextbook Library has open textbooks that have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. 

Open Journal Articles

Digital Commons Network is a searchable repository of free full-text scholarly articles. It includes peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and original research.

Open Media

University of British Columbia's Aggregated List of Image Sources offers a comprehensive list of image collections that are either in the Public Domain or Creative Commons licenced.

Creative Commons Image Search allows users to search across several repositories, including YouTube, Google, SoundCloud, and more, for CC licensed still images, music, and videos.

Flickr Images can be searched by each type of CC licence.

Getty Institute Open Images is a searchable database of Creative Commons licensed images under Getty’s Open Content Program.

TED Talks videos are all Creative Commons licensed unless otherwise indicated.

U.S. Government Photos and Images has a vast collection of photos and images from the U.S. Government, many of which are in the public domain and free to use.

Vimeo and YouTube  videos with a CC license can be found through Advanced Search options on both of these platforms

Open Data

University of British Columbia’s Open Data Collection is a repository of Canadian geospatial datasets, with some local datasets for the lower mainland and UBC campus.

Open Data Canada contains the Government of Canada’s open data sets, covering demographic, financial, map data, and more. 

EU Open Data Portal is a portal housing a variety of open data across EU policy domains, including the economy, employment, science, environment and education.

Data.gov  comprises U.S. federal data with links to U.S. states, cities and counties with web sites that provide open data. Note that non-federal data available through Data.gov may have different licensing than open licensing.

Assessing OER Quality

The Learning Portal  from College Libraries Ontario offers helpful tools for assessing OER quality and accessingbility.

The OER Evaluation Tool, which was originally created by Achieve, Inc, has been tailored for the post-secondary context. It is comprised of eight rubrics for assessing OER—ranging from how well the resource is aligned to learning outcomes, to the degree to which the resource meets local accessibility standards.

You can download the tool in the following formats:

For open textbook reviews, you may wish to use the BC Open Textbook Review Criteria. This rubric contains criteria that many academics use to evaluate open textbooks. Specific criteria listed include the comprehensiveness of the textbook, the organization and flow, and the cultural relevance of the textbook content.

You can download the rubric in the following formats:

Assessing Accessibility

The British Columbia Accessibility Act requires that institutions provide all educational resources in an accessible format. As educators, we an have ethical obligations to ensure that courses are fully accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities.

Unless carefully chosen with accessibility in mind, instructional resources can erect barriers that make learning difficult or impossible. Use the Accessibility Checklist, which has been aligned to accessibility standards. The Checklist will help to ensure that the resources you curate are accessible to all learners.

You can download the checklist in the following formats:

Self-Assessment Checkpoint

Before you move on to the next section, it's time to assess what you've learned so far. These questions are designed to give you the opportunity to find OER that might be suitable for your course and assess their quality and adaptability. 

1. Use the list above to search for OER you could use in your course. Select two potential resources. Note what licenses the creator used. What rights and permissions are granted under these licenses? Can you combine these two resources into one remixed work? If yes, under which license would you release them? 

  2. Use the OER Evaluation Tool or the BC Open Textbook Criteria to evaluate the two resources. After using the rubric, would you judge these resources to be high or low quality according to the rubric criteria? What elements of the OER could you adapt or revise to improve the quality? Consider, do you have the time and resources available to make these changes?

3. Use the accessibility checklist. Decide if the resources you selected will be accessible to all of your students. If not, what changes could you make to the OER to improve accessibility? Do you have any colleague (librarians, instructional designers) who can support you?

Sources

This text from this section is a  CC BY 4.0 licensed remix by Stephanie McLean of the following sources:

Creative Commons. (2019). Finding and Reusing CC-Licensed Work. Retrieved November 5, 2019, from https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/chapter/4-3-finding-and-reusing-cc-licensed-work/  

Smartcopying. (2019). Where to Find OER Materials. Retrieved November 5, 2019, from https://www.smartcopying.edu.au/open-education/open-education-resources/where-to-find-oer-materials 

Open Textbook Library. (2019). Open Textbook Library. Retrieved from https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks 

BCCampus. (2019, March 19). BCcampus OpenEd Resources – Learning about, and experiencing, open educational practices. Retrieved November 5, 2019, from https://open.bccampus.ca/  

College Libraries Ontario. (2019). The Learning Portal: OER Toolkit: Curating. Retrieved November 5, 2019, from https://tlp-lpa.ca/oer-toolkit/finding-curating