OER, NOLO, and the University Library

There are thousands of OERs on the web! You will be able to evaluate the content best, to find what works for your courses.

Here are some additional factors that can help evaluate OERs you find on the web:

• Are there clearly listed authors with a web presence outside of the OER? Often, academic authors will have an additional presence outside of the textbook site. Ideally, you can find evidence that the authors exist, have the right credentials, and are still in an academic or professional context.
• Is the licensing clear? Ideally, OERs have a clear statement describing how they can be used and re-used. If they do not, you can still use it, but best practices are to assign a clear CC license
• Is it hosted on a stable platform? Is it hosted on a large OER website, or a library or university website? Larger institutional or organizational websites are less likely to disappear. OERs hosted on single person's or department's website have more of a chance of being removed.
• Can you need to scaffold with additional content? Even if the content is not quite perfect, you might be able to add other readings (from the web or library subscriptions) to make it work and still be free to your students

➔ The Mason OER Metafinder  launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22* different sources of open educational materials.

➔ Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) currently searches open content from over 80 different sources and contains over 300,000 records. It was developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library and built by Bill Jones, Digital and System Resources librarian and Ben Rawlins, Library Director at SUNY Geneseo.