Open Educational Resources

As faculty, you assess textbooks against a set of criteria that reflects your long experience and knowledge of student needs. You do the same with Open Textbooks, but there are a few additional considerations.

• Content: Accuracy of material, richness, depth, breadth, timeliness, cultural context
• Presentation: Writing quality and tone, reading level, organization, visual presentation, hierarchy of information, collateral material
• Online accessibility: Are the web pages for the textbook accessible?
• Production options: Is the book available in more than one format? Printed? Bound? PDF?
• Platform compatibility: Is the textbook viewable and usable on both MACs and PCs?
• Delivery options: Is a bound copy available at a very low price? Will your bookstore be able to carry the printed version?
• Interactivity: If the online version includes interactive software or multi-media files, are they accessible?
• Consistency between online and printed presentation: Are the online and printed versions comparable in organization and basic appearance? 
• Collateral material: If there are test banks, interactive modules, or other enrichment materials, are they in a format you can use? Are they accessible?  Are they free or very inexpensive?

Student Feedback

The final piece of evaluation is to consider how your students felt about it once the course is complete.  Consider collecting student feedback with this Creative Commons Student Evaluation Checklist.  Edit it, modify it, print it, and distribute it.  

• Accessibility Toolkit by Amanda Coolidge, Sue Doner, Tara Robertson, and Josie Gray
  Provides resources for each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open textbook—one that is free and accessible for all students.
   
• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources
  Supports authors, teachers, professors, librarians, and all open educators in evaluating when and how they can incorporate third-party copyright materials into Open Educational Resources to meet their pedagogical goals.
   

• The OER Starter Kit by Abbey Elder
  This starter kit has been created to provide instructors with an introduction to the use and creation of open educational resources (OER). The text is broken into five sections: Getting Started, Copyright, Finding OER, Teaching with OER, and Creating OER. 

• Preparing for a More Inclusive Course by Alison Flynn and Jeremy Kerr

  Teaching to promote inclusion and celebrate diversity.

• Trans Inclusion in OER by Kat Klement and Stephen G. Krueger

  This resource is a guide on how to make OER more inclusive and representative of trans and gender-diverse people. It is intended to be easily incorporated into a scholarly communications course, while also being valuable to faculty and others interested in learning about the topic and how to make changes to their own course materials.

• Universal Design for Learning (UDL) for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA)

  This resource will help instructors and others to incorporate principles of UDL and considerations of EDI and Indigenisation in their learning environments.

• Worksheet - Open Text Adoption

  The Open Text Adoption Worksheet from the Community College Consortium for Open Education Resources provides an excellent step-by-step walk-through.

• Quick Guide to Adoption

  This Open Textbook Adoption Quick Guide site provides a detailed outline for adopting open textbooks in your course.

• Guidelines for OER in Higher Education

  UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) have developed these Guidelines to support governments, higher education institutions, academics, student bodies, and quality assurance/accreditation bodies.