Many Open Educational Resources (OER) go through a formal peer review process, like traditional learning materials. Such a review of their suitability examines their quality, accuracy and range of content in a similar way to traditional learning materials. In addition to peer review, OER repositories sometimes have ratings that make transparent how other teachers have assessed a resource.

In terms of quality, OER offer the advantage that they can be further edited and thus improvements and updates can easily be made. There is also no reason to assume that free material is of inferior quality. When an author decides to make his or her work available to a large group of people, special attention is usually paid to quality. Another advantage of OER is that they can update and adapt them to the needs of students.

Various checklists help you to check the quality of the OERs you find:

• The OER Evaluation Checklist of the Indiana University Libraries contains aspects for the quality assessment of OER.
• Likewise, the Forsyth Library provides a checklist Evaluating OER.
• For reviewing open textbooks: Open Textbook Rubric (Word document) from College Libraries Ontario.

Other checklists help you to evaluate OER you have created yourself before publishing them:

• Comprehensive OER Evaluation Tool (Word document) from College Libraries Ontario.
• MERLOT Peer Review Forms
• Use the Curating OER – Accessibility Checklist (PDF) from The Learning Portal – College Libraries Ontario to check how accessible your OER content is for people with disabilities.
• BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

Tip: If you create an Open Educational Resource yourself, also ask colleagues to evaluate your resource, for example using the Comprehensive OER Evaluation Tool or the MERLOT Peer Review Form.