Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for increasing equity and access to high-quality K–12 education. Many state education agencies now have offices devoted to identifying and using OERs and other digital resources in their states.

To help states, districts, teachers, and other users determine the degree of alignment of OERs to the Common Core State Standards, and to determine aspects of quality of OERs, Achieve has developed eight rubrics in collaboration with leaders from the OER community (download link for rubrics below). To allow users to apply these rubrics and evaluate the quality of instructional resources, Achieve partnered with OER Commons to develop an online evaluation tool. OER Commons, an online repository for open education resources, is now hosting the tool and its resulting evaluation data. Every resource available on OER Commons contains an "Evaluate Resource" button that will direct users to the evaluation tool. The coding for the tool is freely available online here. Resources rated on OER Commons will create a pool of metadata, and this metadata will be shared through the Learning Registry with other interested repositories.

The Rubrics

Click on the rubric titles to view videos that explain how to apply the rubrics and use the OER Evaluation tool .

Rubric I. Degree of Alignment to Standards

Rubric II. Quality of Explanation of the Subject Matter

Rubric III. Utility of Materials Designed to Support Teaching

Rubric IV. Quality of Assessment

Rubric V. Quality of Technological Interactivity

Rubric VI. Quality of Instructional Tasks and Practice Exercises

Rubric VII. Opportunities for Deeper Learning

Rubric VIII. Assurance of Accessibility

Download the Rubrics.

Below is a set of materials developed to help educators use and learn more about the Achieve OER Rubrics and Evaluation Tool. This includes a handbook and set of presentation slides that give instructions on how to apply the rubrics and use the online tool, as well as examples of what different ratings mean under each rubric. The information included in in the handbook and slides is meant to mirror one another. Multiple ways to read and share this information gives educators the opportunity to use the resource(s) that are most useful for them.

Achieve Open Educational Resources Evaluation Tool Handbook

Click the links below to view and download each set of presentation slides:

An Introduction to the Achieve OER Rubrics

Rubric I: Alignment to Standards

Rubric II: Quality of Explanation of the Subject Matter

Rubric III: Utility of Materials Designed to Support Teaching

Rubric IV: Quality of Assessment

Rubric V: Quality of Technological Interactivity

Rubric VI: Quality of Instructional Tasks and Practice Exercises

Rubric VII: Opportunities for Deeper Learning

Using the Achieve OER Evaluation Tool on OER Commons

Virtual Tour of the OER Rubrics and Evaluation Tool

Acheive OER Institute

Building on these streams of work, seven states in Achieve’s American Diploma Project (ADP) Network —California, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, Washington, and Wisconsin—agreed to work together in Achieve’s OER Institute. The goal of OER Institute is to bring these states together to discuss issues and policy barriers surrounding using OER in college- and career-ready standards implementation. This ongoing, year-long effort has included webinars for states to discuss these issues, such as the use of open licensing and measures of quality, as well as an in-person convening in November 2012 for state teams to share current progress in using OER and develop action plans to use OER in their transition to new standards. Currently, Achieve is assisting teams in refining and implementing these plans and supporting collaboration between the states, such as opportunities to share resources and OER metadata.

Below is the OER Planning Framework and presentation slides used as part of the November 2012 in-person convening.

OER Planning Framework

OER Institute Presentation Slides

This work is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

OER Evaluation Rubrics by Achieve, Inc. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available; contact Achieve.