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OER For Faculty

OER are any type of educational material that are freely available for teachers and students to use, adapt, share, and reuse.

Affordable Learning Materials @ Cline Library

There are many strategies you can use to make your course more affordable, from adopting Open Educational Resources (OER), to utilizing textbooks available through the library, to digitizing course materials and embedding them directly into Canvas.

This page will walk you through some of these cost-saving strategies and give you tips and examples to help you get started.

Evaluation Process

Here are a few steps you might take in the evaluation process. If this process seems lengthy, think about the process you follow to review textbooks and other materials for your course. You can use a similar or modified evaluation process to evaluate OER.

  1. Does this OER cover the content you'd like your students to learn in this course or module? Is the reading level appropriate?
  2. Consider the quality of the OER. Is it peer reviewed? Who are the author(s) and/or sponsoring institution? Are sources properly cited? Does it make use of sound pedagogical methods? 
  3. How can you use the content? Verify the license that the resource is under. Can you remix or revise the OER as long as it isn't for commercial purposes? Who would you need to acknowledge if you use it? 
  4. Once you determine how you can use the OER, what would you like to do with it? Does only a portion of it apply to your class? Would you possibly want to combine this OER with another OER or resource? Does the library have access to articles that could act as supplemental readings?  
  5. As you collect more OER and other resources, save them in a central location. Take note of how you envision using them. Align these resources with the learning objectives on your syllabus in order to identify gaps. 

Evaluation Rubrics, Checklist and Tool

*Note: Some of these evaluation tools align with the Common Core, which might not be important for classes in academia. Please investigate them to see if they fit your needs.

This guide adapts and reuses major portions of the University of Montevallo OER guides, with permission.