EVALUATING RESOURCES
As with all education resources, OER need to be evaluated before use. Educators who are new to OER may have concerns about their quality because these resources are available for free and may have been remixed by other educators. But the process of using and evaluating OER is not that different from evaluating traditional “all rights reserved” copyright resources. Whether education materials are openly licensed or closed, you are the best judge of quality because you know what your learners need and what your curriculum demands.
Subject specialists (educators and librarians) assess the quality and suitability of learning resources. The membership organization JISC provides a list of criteria for the assessment of the quality of these resources.
- Accuracy
- Reputation of author/institution
- Standard of technical production
- Accessibility
- Fitness for purpose[1]
You should be careful not to let anyone tell you that OER are “low quality” because they are free. As the SPARC OER Mythbusting Guide points out:
- In this increasingly digital and Internet-connected world, the old adage that “you get what you pay for” is growing outdated. New models are developing across all aspects of society that dramatically reduce or eliminate costs to users, and this kind of innovation has spread to educational resources.
NOTE
