Consider the following criteria when reviewing OER resources for adopting into your courses. The following is a common rubric to review OER textbooks from the Open Textbook Library's Open Textbooks Review Criteria.
| Cultural Relevance | The text is not culturally insensitive or offensive in any way. It should make use of examples that are inclusive of a variety of races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. |
|---|---|
| Comprehensiveness | The text covers all areas and ideas of the subject appropriately and provides an effective index and/or glossary. |
| Content Accuracy | Content is accurate, error-free and unbiased. |
|
Content is up-to-date, but not in a way that will quickly make the text obsolete within a short period of time. The text is written and/or arranged in such a way that necessary updates will be relatively easy and straightforward to implement. |
| Clarity | The text is written in lucid, accessible prose, and provides adequate context for any jargon/technical terminology used. |
| Consistency | The text is internally consistent in terms of terminology and framework. |
| Modularity | The text is easily and readily divisible into smaller reading sections that can be assigned at different points within the course (i.e., enormous blocks of text without subheadings should be avoided). The text should not be overly self-referential, and should be easily reorganized and realigned with various subunits of a course without presenting much disruption to the reader. |
| Organization/Structure/Flow | The topics in the text are presented in a logical, clear fashion. |
| Interface | The text is free of significant interface issues, including navigation problems, distortion of images/charts, and any other display features that may distract or confuse the reader. |
| Grammatical Errors | The text contains no grammatical errors. |
The below resources and their descriptions were created by the Open Language Resource Center. "The Open Language Resource Center (OLRC) is one of sixteen federally-funded National Foreign Language Resource Centers working to increase the nation’s capacity to teach and learn foreign languages. Founded in 2018, the OLRC focuses on the creation of Open Educational Resources for language learners at the secondary and post-secondary level." Learn more about the Center here: http://olrc.ku.edu/
| Language Resource | Titles |
|---|---|
| Mandarin-Chinese | |
| French |
|
| Haitian Creole |
|
| Portuguese |
|
| Spanish |
|
| Additional Languages |
|
OER Database to Explore |
Description of OER Database |
Content Highlight |
|---|---|---|
|
Provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers. |
“Authored by five researchers at the RAND Corporation this technical report looks into "the roles of the public health service in emergency preparedness and its response to chemical and radiological incidents." |
|
|
Find open public health courses and materials taught at the John Hopkins University. Content varies but generally includes a syllabus, lecture materials and reading lists. |
“Introduces the material covered in the Department of Health Policy and Management. Focuses on four substantive areas that form the analytic basis for many of the issues in Health Policy and Management. The areas are: (1) economics and financing, (2) need and demand, (3) politics/ethics/law, and (4) quality/effectiveness. Illustrates these issues using three specific policy issues: (1) injury, (2) medical care, and (3) public health preparedness.” |
|
|
A public digital library of open education resources. Offers a comprehensive infrastructure for curriculum experts and instructors at all levels to identify high-quality OER and collaborate around their adaptation, evaluation, and use to address the needs of teachers and learners. |
PubHlth1: Principles of Public Health (English) "Introduces the major concepts and principles of public health and the determinants of health status in communities. Emphasizes the ecological model that focuses on the linkages and relationships among multiple natural and social determinants affecting health.” |
|
|
Part of Rice University, publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print. |
Collection focuses mostly on mathematics and science. |
OER Database to Explore |
Description of OER Database |
Strengths of the Collection |
|---|---|---|
|
Provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers. |
Allows you to browse the collection by discipline. |
|
|
Launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button. The results returned are up-to-the-minute for each search target. Additional results will continue to trickle in as the search continues running and you begin examining your results. |
A distinct feature of the Mason OER Metafinder is the scope of discovery service. It searches well-known OER repositories like OpenStax, OER Commons, MERLOT but also sites like HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive and NYPL Digital Collections where valuable but often overlooked (and often “open”) educational materials may be found.
|
|
|
Building information equity in social work with open educational resources and open access to research. |
Provides textbooks potentially of interest to social work educators organized by core domains of social work education. |
|
|
Digital Commons Network: Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons |
Brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. |
Includes peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work. |
