OER Academy: Tools for Evaluating

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 second 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"

Conversations About Quality

When was the last time you were able to have a discussion about the curriculum or courseware you use with a colleague? Many of us have limited time and opportunities to have rich conversations that assess the quality of the resources we use.

REFLECT: Think about the last time you had a conversation about quality with a colleague. What did you discuss? What about the conversation helpful to you? Reply here

For example, the photo above shows Arabic Language Teachers having a conversation about the quality of the language resources they are currently using in their classrooms. They were sharing examples of how they integrate Arabic culture into their teaching. They discussed the successful activities they have done with students that allow them to learn Arabic through playing music and singing.

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

Evaluation Tools

OER Commons has evaluation tools that allow you to have conversations about quality directly on the resource description. Join our OER Training Team as we explore the tools for evaluation, including the Achieve rubric, star ratings, and comments.

WATCH the OER Evaluation Tools demonstration below

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.

PRACTICE: Now it’s your turn to practice using the evaluation tools on OERCommons.org. To get started, use search or advanced search to find a resource you can use in your work. Select one resource to evaluate, rate, and write a comment. Share a link to your evaluated resource here