2 Finding, Evaluating, and Adapting Resources
Teachers have always created and shared teaching materials, though finding and reusing others’ work is not always simple.[1] This chapter will teach you how to find free and openly licensed teaching resources that already exist and adapt them for use in your own classrooms.
Why It Matters
If you’re going to find the best open resources for your course, and share your work as OER, and join an OER community of practice, you need to know how to find, evaluate, and adapt openly licensed resources. And what if we want to think bigger, what effect might open education have globally?
How is the openness, the opportunity to revise, remix and share, of content potentially impactful on a global scale? If the public had access to and could creatively remix the world’s knowledge, what new opportunities might we find to address global challenges (e.g., United Nations Sustainable Development Goals)
Learning Outcomes
- Find OER in open repositories, Google, CC Search, and other platforms
- Evaluate how to reuse, revise, and remix the OER you find
- Demonstrate how different OER can be used together, paying attention to license compatibility.
Personal Reflection: What it Matters to You
Where do you currently find your learning resources? Do you seek open alternatives for materials you currently use? How do you evaluate your existing learning resources, and how can you apply those measures to openly licensed content?[2]
Once you identify the learning resources you currently use, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is this resource available to all of my learners at no cost?
- Can my learners and I keep a copy of this resource forever?
- Does my class have the legal rights to fix errors, update old or inaccurate content, improve the work, and share it with other educators around the world?
- Can my learners contribute to and improve our learning resources as part of their course work?
If the answer to these questions is “No,” you’re likely using learning resources that don’t provide the legal permissions you and your learners need to do what you want to do. Conversely, if you answered “Yes” to all of the questions, you are likely using OER.
Acquiring Essential Knowledge
Finding Resources
Not everything on the internet is OER, and some works labeled as “open” may not have the legal permissions to exercise the 5Rs. So how do you recognize OER and how do you choose which OER will work best in your class? Remember that for a resource to be an OER it has to be available to everyone at no cost and be in the public domain or under an open license.
Finding the resources you want to use is the first step to bringing OER into your classroom. Discovery is one of the primary barriers to educators using OER. Fortunately, there are many established ways to search for OER.
First, for a short introduction on how to find OER, watch this video:
If you want to know more about most popular general options for searching for OER, you mi