LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: Evaluating OER

How Do I Adopt Open Textbooks?

Provide your students an alternative to expensive textbooks by following these steps, adopted from the Five Steps to OER Adoption from the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources:

Find an open textbook. Browse OER by subject - or - general OER collections.
Evaluate and select an open textbook. See the box labeled "How Do I Evaluate OER?" box on this page.
Modify the textbook as needed.
Determine the proper attribution for your open textbook.
Obtain curriculum approval if required.
Deliver to your students. Make your open textbook available to your students via printed copies or a link in your D2L course.

Read more about Open Textbook Adoption from OpenStax at Rice University.

How Do I Evaluate OER?

As faculty, you assess textbooks against a set of criteria that reflects your long experience and knowledge of student needs. Here are some guides that help you evaluate OER:

Faculty guide for evaluating open education resources (PDF)
This checklist contains some suggestions for faculty when choosing resources for use in the classroom. From the BCcampus Open Textbook Project.
OER adoption worksheet (PDF)
You can print and download this worksheet to record your evaluation. From the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources.
Rubrics for evaluating OER objects
Choose one of eight rubrics to determine the degree of alignment of OER to college- and career-ready standards and to determine other aspects of quality of OER.

Want to adopt this guide?

Oakland Community College Library Research Guide on Open Educational Resources by OCC Librarians is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://nmc.libguides.com/oer and https://libguides.lcc.edu/oer/overview.

Guide Editor: Wendy Kamps-Tsao