Find OERs | The Teaching & Learning Centre | Seneca Polytechnic

Evaluating OERs

The process is similar to evaluating textbooks.

1. Does this OER cover the content you’d like your students to learn in this course?
2. Is the level of the content appropriate? Or is it too high-level, low-level, or technical?
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 do you have to recognize if you use it? Will you be able to do so? For more help with this, please contact the Copyright Team.
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?

Evaluation Rubrics

• Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Education Resources – BCcampus
• Rubric for Evaluating Open Education Resources Objects

(modified from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Open Textbook Collections

• • Seneca OER Examples 
    Textbooks, resource sites and course support resources developed by our own faculty
  • Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) currently searches open content from 98 different sources and contains 368,234 records.
  • Open Educational Resource 2017 Textbook List
    An updated, discipline specific OER textbook list.
  • eCampus Ontario Open Textbook Library
    A curated collection of over 150 of the best open textbooks from other sources. Most book pages include comprehensive reviews by Canadian professors.
  • OER Commons
    A large repository for Open Educational Resources, including textbooks. Contains material for preschool to university.
  • Open Textbook Library
    Open textbooks on a variety of subjects created by the University of Minnesota. This collection lists more books than the eCampus site, but fewer books are reviewed.
  • OpenStax College
    A nonprofit initiative of Rice University dedicated to publishing quality Open Access Textbooks. More than 20 books have been created.
  • OpenStax CNX
    View and share free educational material in small modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports or other academic assignments.
  • Libretexts
    A multi-institutional collaborative venture of open-access texts at all levels of higher learning.
  • Global Text Project
    Joint project of the University of Georgia and the University of Denver in the areas of Business, Computing, Education, Health, Science and Social Science.
  • 2012 Book Archive
    A publisher released all of their textbooks under a Creative Commons license as a pilot project in 2012. While they chose to discontinue the pilot, copies of the books were uploaded to this site.
  • Noba
    “The Noba catalog covers the traditional scope of introductory psychology and then some, including 103 modules (and counting). Use them as-is or customize them to fit your needs. Instructor manual, PowerPoint presentations, and test bank available for many modules.”
  • Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
    “Simultaneously search OER repositories”
  • MyOpenMath
    “A collection of material for math at the college level, including instructor resources”

For more information about finding OERs, visit the Curating page on the Learning Portal.