OER Content Mapping and Assessment
2.1 Overview
Karna Younger
Creating an OER is like an endurance sport. Charting your OER learning outcomes plotted your skeletal structure for this challenge. You can think of this stage as a type of conditioning for the long road ahead. During your gap analysis you found an abundance of or sparse openly licensed materials to remix for your OER, many of you reflected that there wasn’t a particular source that was perfect for your courses. In particular most of you concluded that DEIA content was rather lacking. To move forward, you need to take stock of what you have, what you need, and what will hold you back.
This section is intended to outline a reflective and iterative practice for mapping your OER content. We will guide you through cutting unneeded materials and targeting the content, assessment, and visual elements that will build upon your OER learning outcomes, topics, and table of contents. Throughout you will see prompts to consider how content will help you accomplish your OER goals.
As you deliberate what OER content you wish to retain or create, you should remind yourself of the OERFSJ Rubric, which included Sarah Lambert’s 3 R’s of open education. In particular, you may consider how your content recognized diverse experiences and knowledge and if historically marginalized people or groups are self-representing their own stories.
Identity for individuals and groups can be far more complicated than the broad term of diversity implies, though. To help conceptualize the voices who should be included in your OER, you may reflect on an identity wheel adapted by the folx at Loyola Marymount University’s (LMU) Anti-Racism Workshop Series (LAWS).
Warm up activity
Let’s do a little compound warm up activity before you get going. Below is a set of reflection questions you could consider throughout your OER creation process and a sample chapter, “Diversity Families“ by Joan Giovannini. Created for the ROTEL Project, Giovannini remixed an existing OER to include DEIA and social justice content.
We would like you try using Hypothes.is to evaluate Giovannini’s chapter for equity. Hypothes.is is a free, web-based tool that allows you or a group of people to annotate webpages and more in private or public groups. For instance, we use it for our own private research projects or to mark up OER that we are remixing for OERFSJ.
- If you do not have a Hypothes.is account, set up a free account. Be certain to add Hypothes.is to your browser. (We usually use Chrome.)
- Once Hypothes.is is a part of your life, join the OERFSJ Faculty Hypothes.is group using this invitation. This is a private group, so only OERFSJ members can see annotations.
- Open “Diversity Families” and activate Hypothes.is. If a collapsed sidebar on the rig
ht side of the page is not present, you should have a small H on your browser’s extensions menu (as pictured to the right). - Make certain you have selected the OERFSJ Faculty group to record your comments. To change, open the sidebar to the right and click on the down arrow
Use small down arrow to select Hypothes.is group, OERFSJ Faculty. at the top left of the sidebar (likely next to the word Public, the default group).
- Feel free to respond throughout the chapter to questions posted to the OERFSJ Faculty group or raise your own thoughts.
Tip: Hypothes.is could be a useful tool for annotating the OER content you want to remix. We used it to remix OER for this Handbook.
Guiding Questions: Creating Equitable OER with Intention
- How will you ensure a diversity of perspectives, experiences, and people are present throughout the resource in a way that is inclusive, respectful, and is not othering? This includes things like images, case studies, examples, and names.
- How might this resource decenter the dominant culture and ways of knowing?
- How might your resource address social inequities and issues?
- How will you ensure that you meaningfully engage with the work of authors, researchers, and organizations from a diversity of backgrounds and lived experiences throughout the resource? This includes but is not limited to race, class, gender, ethnicity, geographic location, and disability.
Adapted from “Guiding Questions: Creating Equitable OER with Intention” by Josie Gray and Clint Lalonde at BCcampus. Used under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Hitting the road
Such reflections are intended to be just a starting place and may spark additional questions. Don’t get hamstrung if you don’t know all the answers or can’t quite locate or name a need. We do not pretend to have all the answers to such questions and don’t expect you to either. We encourage you, however, to take these guiding questions (listed below) with you as you inventory your OER content. We will work through this process together and come out stronger on the other side.
And if all this endurance sports talk is lost on you. Don’t worry. We don’t really “sports” either, and the analogy will be over soon.
Media
