Not all OERs are created equally. Before incorporating OER materials into your course there are several factors you should consider. Refer to the links below for evaluation criteria options.
Open Textbook Rubric (PDF 93KB)
Useful rubric for evaluating resources by many elements including: comprehensiveness, accuracy, grammatical errors, audience and more.
Open Education Resource Repository (OERR) Rubric (PDF 200KB)
Developed by the BCOEL Group to provide a process of evaluating open education resource repositories.
Faculty Checklist for Evaluating Course Materials
Checklist to assess whether the materials or platform they are considering for adoption will meet student needs.
Lambton College Library's guide on how to evaluate resources for quality for students, faculty and staff. The guide includes information about the CRAAP Test.
Open educational resources (OER) allow instructors and students to access, use, revise/remix and share pedagogically appropriate learning materials freely. There are less restrictive copyright licenses (for example, Creative Commons licenses) attached to OER than there are for traditionally published materials.
Lambton College Library's guide on copyright. This guide includes information on defining copyright, public domain, creative commons, fair dealing, and copyright guidelines for Lambton College educators.
Licensing – The Learning Portal
The Learning Portal's OER Toolkit guide on Licensing. This guide includes information on copyright, copyleft, open licenses, permissions, public domain, creative commons, and fair dealing.
Copyright Introduction from University of Saskatchewan, licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 CA license.
Citing openly licensed materials, whether they're images or videos or textbooks, is often referred to as "attribution" in the OER world. To "attribute" something, you are giving credit. It's the same idea as "citing" -- just a different term for it.
Best practices for attribution
These guidelines provide examples of different content type attributions.
When you use Creative Commons licensed content, you must include an attribution.
What are attributions? text created by Tacoma Community College, licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.