More than merely collecting content on a specific subject, strong curation involves carefully selecting content and evaluating it for a specific purpose. When OER are part of the curation process, content deemed useful during the evaluation process can then be customised by the curator, and re-shared for future users.
Below is a high level overview of the processes and steps involved in curating OER.
Attribution:
Introductory text is a derivative of Content Curation: Finding the Needles in the Haystacks, by Christopher Lister, Roaming Educator, licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International.
Processes for Curating OER by ISKME, licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
There are a multitude of OER out there to choose from, including open textbooks, courses, multimedia resources, and data. These can be found by searching regular search engines (like Google), but it is much easier to find them through dedicated OER repositories or libraries.
For a broader list of OER content we suggest you search Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) which has broader, real-time, search capabilities. It can simultaneously search across 22 different sources of open educational materials, including well-known OER repositories such as OER Commons, MERLOT, and OpenStax, and also sites such as HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive and NYPL Digital Collections.
As well as the sampling of OER repositories and libraries listed below, a more comprehensive list of Open Educational Resources (OER) is available.
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is one of the biggest repositories of open educational content using OpenCourseWare (OCW). The focus is on developing and sharing freely available, stand-alone, online course, and teaching materials. OCW usually includes items such as lecture notes, reading lists, course assignments, syllabi, study materials, tests, samples and simulations. You can find course materials by browsing individual university OpenCourseWare websites or by searching across all courses in the OCW Consortium’s website.
In addition to the eCampus Open Textbook Library, other websites offer collections of open textbooks. Below is a sampling of these libraries from Australia, Canada, and the U.S.
The collections of aggregated OER below are some of the larger known initiatives that are utilised by academics and library staff. Many of them have overlapping resources, as they curate and aggregate their content from the same content providers.
The collections listed below offer a range of multimedia resources for use and integration into teaching and learning. .
Open data may include non-textual material such as map-based data, mathematical and scientific formulae, medical data, demographic data, financial data, and so forth. The collections listed below are all freely available to use, integrate, modify and manipulate to meet local needs.
Attribution:
Introductory text a derivative of BCcampus Faculty OER Toolkit, by BCcampus, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
The best OER evaluation rubrics include traditional evaluative criteria that address a resource’s editorial quality. They also include criteria that address resource portability, and resource effectiveness in engaging learners. Below is a sampling of rubrics that are recommended for use in evaluating OER.
Use or adapt this OER Evaluation Tool, which was originally created by Achieve, Inc. Achieve is a US-based education nonprofit, and a leader in the development of OER evaluation rubrics.
The tool has been tailored for the OCLS post-secondary context. It is comprised of eight rubrics for assessing OER—ranging from how well the resource is aligned to learning outcomes, to the degree to which the resource meets local accessibility standards.
You can download the tool in the following formats:
For open textbook reviews, you may wish to use the BC Open Textbook Review Criteria. This rubric contains criteria that much of the field uses in evaluating open textbooks. Specific criteria listed include the comprehensiveness of the textbook, the organisation and flow, and the cultural relevance of the textbook content.
You can download the rubric in the following formats:
Western Sydney University strongly supports the aims and provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act (1992) and Disability Discrimination Act Education Standards (2005). Our latest Accessibility Action Plan 2018-2020 therefore articulates the active measures the University will take to prevent disability discrimination across the institution and the Greater Western Sydney region.
The University’s Disability Policy states our commitment to provide reasonable adjustments wherever possible to students and staff to accommodate disability-related needs. There are no specific guidelines for what is accessible—other than it must meet the need of the student requesting the accessible format. However, as academics we a have ethical obligations to ensure that courses are fully accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities.
Unless carefully chosen with accessibility in mind, instructional resources can erect barriers that make learning difficult or impossible. Use the Accessibility Checklist, which has been aligned to accessibility standards. The Checklist will help to ensure that the resources you curate are accessible to all learners.
You can download the checklist in the following formats:
If you identify changes or additions you want to make to your resource based on your evaluation results, you can use the field-tested guides and tools below to help you in your alignment effort.
Module Builder is a tool that allows instructors to create both student and instructor facing content views. Academics are encouraged to include overviews, pedagogical supporting text, and instructions for both students and other users of the resource.
Module Builder is a tool available through OER Commons and its suite of Open Author tools.
MERLOT’s Content Builder provides templates for creating tailored websites with a variety of designs, including e-portfolio structures, lesson plans, online courses, and others.
There are many ways to share OER. You may want to forward your OER to colleagues via email, or share it within your local learning management system. Below are tools and information to help you in describing, organising, and assigning a licence to your OER to enable subsequent use of your OER by others, within and beyond your institution.
The OER Commons library offers interfaces for users to select from lists of recommended descriptors, as well as to create customised taxonomies for describing and organising OER into personal or shared collections around specific topics, subject areas, or courses.
Although not designed uniquely for OER curation, LiveBinders allows users to create a central hub of digital resources on a topic, organised by a system of tabs. Peer and user feedback can be added to each binder through sharing and commenting features.
LibGuides are a useful tool that many libraries already subscribe to and that library staff could use for organising OER by discipline, subject or topics, and for specific courses when collaborating with academics.
When you curate coursework or collections that include OER, you'll need to consider how those resources may be used by others based on the copyright permissions that are allowed. If you are curating a resource or collection with content from various sources, you'll also need to consider how the different licences for each piece of content should be integrated into your final resource or collection.
Watch this short video clip on Combining Open Licences to help guide you through these considerations. You can also download the Combining Open Licences video transcript.
© Western Sydney University, unless otherwise attributed.
Library guide created by Western Sydney University Library staff is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY)