CCCS Faculty Toolkit

Quality Concerns

As a faculty member, you may have questions like these:

• Are open textbooks up to date?
• Saving students money is important, but what about student learning?
• Although it's free, is it any good?

Quality is always a concern when selecting materials for your class. Whether the materials are openly licensed and freely available online or a copyrighted traditional textbook, the truth is all educational materials need to be carefully evaluated before being selected in your course, regardless of copyright or licensing status.

Evaluating OER

There are several ways to ensure that you are using high quality open educational resources.

1. Search for peer reviews of openly licensed materials. A few places to start:

• Open Textbook Library
• BC Campus Open Textbooks

2. Conduct your own review of copyrighted or openly licensed course materials. Many tools have been developed to help educators with the evaluation process. The Open Textbook Network's Open Textbooks Review Criteria is a useful 10-point rubric that you can use. The Faculty Evaluation Guide is another beneficial checklist.

3. Other considerations when evaluating OER:

• Licensing: the text has an open license allowing the 5Rs of openness so the content can be used and altered for the course.
• Learning level: the content is clearly written at a level appropriate for the students' level of understanding.
• Accessibility: the content is accessible for your students.

4. If your college offers OER funding or OER grants, apply for it to create or modify course content.

Further reading:

• On Quality and OER - blog post by David Wiley
• The Review Project - Open Education Group; A summary of all known empirical research on the impacts of OER adoption
• Achieve Rubrics for Evaluating OER Objects - PDF by Achieve, a non-profit education organization focused on college & career readiness

The ALMS Framework

Open licenses provide users with legal permission to engage in the 5R activities, but many open content publishers make technical choices that interfere with a user’s ability to engage in those same activities.

The ALMS Framework provides a way of thinking about those technical choices and understanding the degree to which they enable or impede a user’s ability to engage in the 5R activities permitted by open licenses.

• Access to Editing Tools: Is the open content published in a format that can be revised by using freely available tools? Will the content run on all major platforms?
• Level of Expertise Required: Is the open content published in a format that requires a significant amount (e.g., Blender) or a minimum level (e.g., Word) of technical expertise to revise or remix? 
• Meaningfully Editable: Is the open content published in a manner that makes its content essentially impossible to revise or remix (e.g., a scanned image of a handwritten document)? Is the open content published in a manner making its content easy to revise or remix (e.g., a text file)?
• Self-Sourced: Is the format preferred for consuming the open content the same format preferred for revising or remixing the open content (e.g., HTML)? Is the format preferred for consuming the open content different from the format preferred for revising or remixing the open content (e.g. Flash FLA vs SWF)?

"ALMS Framework" by Sophie Rondeau, Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) is licensed under CC-BY

Accessibility Tools

Digital resources such as OER should be designed with accessibility in mind to remove barriers to use for learners with diverse needs. Accessible content meets the requirements of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) and also removes barriers for everyone, not just those with documented disabilities, to make content more universally usable for students.

If you find open educational resources that have accessibility issues, the open license gives you permission to revise that content to make it more accessible, and then redistribute your accessible version back out to the commons. Whether you are developing your own open educational resources or revising existing OER content, you can use an accessibility checker (example: https://wave.webaim.org) to get started.

A few basic practices that should become habits:

• Include alt tags with images
• Video is captioned
• PDF's are machine readable
• Document structures use headings to support navigation by screen readers
• Links are anchored to descriptive text rather than the word "here"

Additional Resources

• BCCampus Accessibility Toolkit (2nd ed.)
• Web Accessibility Guidelines handbook (2nd ed.) by Portland Community College: Distance Education & Instructional Support
• WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)
• WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE can help identify accessibility errors.)
• WEBAim Color Contrast Checker (Easy to use tool to check contrast and color for visual disabilities.)
• Color Safe
• ANDI (Accessible Name and Description Inspector) (An accessibility testing tool with an extension for web browsers.)
• ANDI Modules (Users can test the accessibility of forms, images, headings, color contrast, and more.)
• CAST
• Creating Accessible Documents guide
• Doing the Work: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Open Educational Resources
• Microsoft Office Accessibility Checker
• National Education Technology Plan
• UDL Universe