OER Acad

Quality Matters

Each of us has our own quality criteria that help 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. 

For example, I’ve been searching for various videos to introduce new content to my students. Videos must have a 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.

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.