OER Academy: OER Quality Evaluation

Welcome

ISKME's OER Commons Team has designed these OER Academy modules to support and advance your open educational practice. Our comprehensive OER toolset and immersive professional learning program will assist educators in enhancing their capacities to use, evaluate, curate, and create OER. 

This is the first module in our OER Academy series that will provide participants with an exploration of OER quality evaluation. We have designed these modules to first spark the learner's interest in the topics covered and then dig deeper into the content through presentations, storytelling, and demonstrations of the tools. We will offer opportunities for learners to practice exploring the resources and tools, and reflect on how they might use them in their work. 

OER Academy Outline:

Introduction to OER  (3 modules)

- Module 1 - Overview of the what, why, and how of OER; including an exploration in open licensing and a showcase of OER use cases from around the world

- Module 2 - Content Discovery: identify teaching and learning goals, search and browse collections

- Module 3 - Curation and Collaboration of OER with groups, shared folders and discussions

Quality Evaluation (2 modules)

- Module 1 - Quality: participants reflect and share their quality criteria for teaching and learning materials they use

- Module 2 - Tools for Evaluating: explore digital tools for assessing OER (Achieve Rubric, Rating, Comments)

Authoring and Remixing (3 modules)

- Module 1 - Authoring Toolset: demonstration of Open Author and Module Builders

- Module 2 - OER Design: discover instructional design supports, including templates

- Module 3 - OER Remix: overview of the what, why, and how of remixing OER

Open Education Practice for curriculum improvement (1 module)

- Deep dive into the feedback, refinement, reflection, and revision process

Leadership and Advocacy (1 module)

- Exploration and planning of ways to lead and advocate for OER

Pre-activities:

To participate in group discussions during the REFLECT sections you will need to create a login and join the Group. Please see instructions below

CREATE A PROFILE on OER Commons to be able to contribute to the discussions in our group, and to save, organize, remix, and author resources. Share some information about yourself and upload a photo or image here: https://www.oercommons.org/profile/edit

JOIN OUR GROUP Once you've logged in successfully, join the Introduction to OER Group by clicking "Join This Group"

Quality Matters

Each of us have our own quality criteria that helps us select which resources we use in our teaching.

Discussing OER Quality

REFLECT: Take a moment to reflect on your quality criteria and provide two or three examples of the criteria you use to help you assess if the resources you find are acceptable to use in your teaching. Reply here

For example, I’ve been searching for various videos to introduce new content to my students. Videos must have clear and concise presentation of the content with easy to understand visuals because my students will be watching them on their own time. Videos must have accessibility supports like closed captioning for my hearing impaired students.

*Reminder: you will need to be logged in and join the Group to reply to the discussion.

Evaluation Supports

OERCommons.org has supports to help us assess the quality of OER we discover. To help educators determine the degree of alignment of OER to standards and to determine other aspects of quality of OER, Achieve developed rubrics in collaboration with leaders from the OER community. Achieve partnered with ISKME to develop an online evaluation tool to allow users to apply these rubrics and evaluate the quality of instructional resources. We will be using the tool in our next module to formally assess OER, and we wanted to give you an overview of the seven quality areas that the rubric assesses with the hopes that this will inform your own quality criteria for selecting resources to use in your teaching.

- Degree of Alignment to Standards - How closely aligned to the learning standard is this resource? Standards could be common core, next generation science, or other

- Quality of Explanation of the Subject Matter - How thoroughly is the subject matter explained in this resource?

- Utility of Materials Designed to Support Teaching - Is this resource designed to support teachers in planning and presenting the resource? Is it easy for teachers to understand and use?

- Quality of Assessment - Are there assessments included in this resource that determine what a student knows before, during, and after the subject is taught?

- Quality of Technological Interactivity - Is technological interactivity included in this resource?

- Quality of Instructional and Practice Exercises - Are exercises designed to provide an opportunity to practice and strengthen specific skills and knowledge?

- Opportunities for Deeper Learning - Are students engaged in any of the deeper learning skill areas below? 

Think critically and solve complex problems. Work collaboratively. Communicate effectively. Learn how to learn. Reason abstractly. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. Apply discrete knowledge and skills to real-world situations. Construct, use, or analyze models. 

Any OERCommons.org  user is welcome to assess and evaluate resources using the Achieve OER Evaluation Rubrics. While not all of the resources on have been evaluated with these rubrics, some of them have been evaluated and you can search by rubric in Advanced Search.

REFLECT: Given what we have shared and explored today, if you were to add an eighth quality area to the Achieve Rubric, what might you recommend? Add your suggested quality area description in two sentences or less with your Reply Here

Next Modules

Our next module will focus on OER Evaluation Tools and will be an opportunity to explore digital tools for assessing OER with rubrics, ratings, and comments.