Research Guides: Open Educational Resources (OERs) Toolkit: Evaluate OERs

How to evaluate OERs

There are many considerations when evaluating OERs for adoption, including content, quality, format, and licensing. You may want to develop your own assessment checklist as you evaluate OERs, tailored to the needs of your own students. Here are some examples to help you consider criteria for evaluation:

Achieve OER Rubrics
A set of rubrics for evaluating OERs from the nonprofit Achieve.
Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Education Resources
A checklist from Canada's BCOER, a group of librarians in British Columbia.
Open Textbook Adoption Worksheet
This Worksheet was developed by Dr. Judy Baker, Director of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER).
Open Textbook Library Review Rubric
A list of OER review criteria from the University of Minnesota's Open Textbook Library.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion in OERs

Equity and Openness
A blog series on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) from the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER).
Assessing Visual Materials for Diversity & Inclusivity
Helps educators develop a framework for assessing visuals for diversity and inclusion.

Accessibility & Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

One important consideration is determining whether your OERs are accessible for all students. Here are some resources and things to consider.

Accessibility and Open Educational Resources
From UDL On Campus, this article and list of resources explain the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach to accessibility in OERs. Includes examples of accessible OERs.
Accessibility Module from Affordable Learning Georgia
A one page accessibility checklist to consider and links to further resources.
Clear Print Guidelines
Ontario's Universities Accessible Campus guide for print accessibility.
Creating Accessible Presentations in Microsoft PowerPoint
from University of Washington
Eight fonts for print accessibility
Perkins School for the Blind's favorite fonts for print accessibility.
Making PDF files work with screen readers
From McGill University; how to be sure your PDF has "optical character recognition," with or without Adobe Pro.
OER Accessibility Toolkit
A self-paced guide from University of British Columbia.
Universal Design for Learning Guidelines
From the Center for Applied Special technology (CAST), an interactive graphic tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Easy Checks
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops its work through a consensus-based process, involving different stakeholders in Web accessibility. This is one of many tools on their site.