You've found an OER. Congrats! Now you should go through a quick evaluation process to determine whether it's right for your purposes. You can use the forms/rubrics below or SAIT's OER Evaluation Rubric as a checklist during your evaluation. Look for reviews within the repositories as well, as many have a peer review process. Along the way, keep track of what sections of the OER you might want to adapt and enhance to meet your needs.
Content adapted from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. Content is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA.
Additional Evaluation Tools:
While there are so many OERs already available, you might decide the content isn't quite complete for your course. In that case, consider modifying existing materials or creating your own. These can include new or updated content from your discipline, or changing to different formats such as instructional videos, lecture slides, worksheets, quizzes or interactive tools. Additionally, creating OER opens the possibility for including student contributions as part of the process.
Know Your Options! Using a Creative Commons license on open educations resources is common practice. Creative Commons (CC) licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. Each of the licenses is represented with a symbol that explains all the rights associated with the resource.
Full details for the Creative Common Licenses listed below are found at: The Licenses
Attribution
CC BY
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
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Attribution-ShareAlike
CC BY-SA
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
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Attribution-NoDerivs
CC BY-ND
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
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Attribution-NonCommercial
CC BY-NC
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC BY-NC-SA
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND
This license is the most restrictive of the six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.