Finding, Evaluating, and Advocating for OER

While reading What is OER, you were invited to imagine redesigning elements of an existing research project, course, or lesson to incorporate open educational resources in ways that suit your local context. Some of you might be considering materials such as datasets, lab experiments, simulations or discussion prompts. Others could be pondering videos, syllabi, slide presentations or assignments.

Still more might be thinking toward adopting, adapting, or re-mixing course design templates or course texts. You will find this chapter most helpful if you have something specific in mind. Skim the stakeholder section specific to your campus role for ideas.

Many faculty already use OER in their classes — for example, showing an openly licensed course video or using worksheets created and shared by other faculty. Faculty can create and share syllabi, lesson plans, and even entire textbooks for their courses. They can collaborate with faculty at their own institutions, or other institutions around the world. They can access and remix existing OER and re-publish them to share with others.

If you are brand new to this idea, you might consider how you could customize a slide deck you have created to create a module students can experience that doesn’t lean on a commercial textbook.

If you have splashed in the OER pond a bit already, you might consider how you could adopt an existing textbook for use instead of requiring students to purchase a commercial textbook.

If you have looked at OER before but not found anything you loved, this is an excellent opportunity to explore how to take bits and pieces of several texts to remix as a bespoke resource for your course at your school.

Finding OER

There are many places to find openly licensed resources. I’d suggest you keep in  mind the type of resource you need. If you are looking for something similar to a traditional textbook, I’d suggesting trying the Open Textbook Library, the Pressbooks Directory, or OpenStax. If you are looking for modules, assignments, or other elements you can integrate into your course try OER Commons or SkillsCommons. OASIS and MASON  are also effective, but may be a bit overwhelming. Look around a bit, and once you have a sense of what you do or don’t like, contact your librarian and they will help you find what you need. You may find a little of what you need in several different resources. Because they are openly licensed you can pick and choose the parts that you like and put them together to create a contextualized resource that supports your course exactly the way you teach it.

Evaluating OER

You no doubt have your own ways of evaluating the quality and credibility of the information sources you are using. When you step into the OER world, you get to center your own expertise rather than depending on a brand or commercial publisher to tell you about the quality and credibility of a resource.

There are some faculty created resources that can help scope this evaluation. The OSU Speech Faculty have shared out the OER Review Checklist they use to evaluate resources. Theirs was adapted from one created by Affordable Learning Georgia. OER consultants from across the U.S. collaborated to create an OER Review Standards and Approval Rubric, and the OSRHE Online Consortium of Oklahoma has created a template useful to guide the search  and a checklist to guide the evaluation of OER.

Advocating for OER

Centering faculty expertise and student success by moving toward OER can come with many leadership challenges. In your role as administrator, you are able to provide support and leadership through policy creation and strategic vision. But you also have to navigate the needs of an entire system, and it takes intentionality and energy to make changes to one part of the system without risking harm to another part of the system.

Your words matter, though, so even if you are not in a position to explicitly speak to the use of OER in policy or strategic vision documents, there are ways that you can show support to faculty actively responding to student concerns regarding the cost of textbooks by curating and creating open educational resources. You can lean into the OSRHE endorsement of OER use in the Blueprint 2030 to help support your advocacy, and point faculty toward the OSRHE/OCO OER funding to help faculty and instructors adopting and adapting OER. Even drafting a short note of thanks to be included in the materials shared with those engaged in this work would be meaningful. Two or three sentences of support from administration goes a long way. For instance, “I, President of The Best College/University, am thankful for the way my faculty and instructors have responded to student concerns by curating and creating open educational resources. These resources center the expertise of our faculty and scholars and exemplify the Best College/University code by increasing student access to learning experiences.”

Another option is to provide a short note of thanks to be included in the materials shared with those engaged in this work. The example letter below is a bit wordy, but you might find a few parts that would work for you.