 Last week, we addressed how students can help speak up to encourage OER use on campus, but then what? How can instructors effectively locate and evaluate open educational resources if they want to use them in their classes? Today, I'll be highlighting a few repositories where you can search for OER, techniques for locating the sources you need, and rubrics available for evaluating the resources you find too. Before we dive in, I'll give a quick definition of what we're talking about. Open educational resources are openly licensed educational materials like textbooks, lab books, syllabi, and even full courses that are freely available online for anyone who wants to use them. But finding OER can be really difficult for some instructors. The internet is full of information and it can be hard to find useful high-quality educational resources even if you know what you're looking for. So what can you do about that? You can start by learning a few tricks about searching for open educational content online. There are three steps you need to take when searching for OER in your subject area. First, you need to identify keywords and basic ideas related to your subject. Techniques for finding OER are similar to the techniques you might use to find anything else online. Start broad and work your way up to more narrow and specialized topics. Identify keywords. You may not be able to find an open textbook that has the same title as your class. But starting with a general term can bring up a lot of resources you might be interested in. Second, you need to compile a list of all the available resources that relate to your subject area. Don't be picky yet. Just find everything you can and wait to judge them until later. This will give you a good idea about the breadth of the resources available to you before we start eliminating options. Finally, you can evaluate your resources. Go through the tables of contents of the open textbooks you've found to see if any of the chapters align with subjects you teach in your class. Decide if videos or lesson plans will fit into your learning objectives or the way you like to teach. We'll cover other options for evaluating OER later, but for now, just remember, identify, compile, and evaluate. Now, you might be thinking, I need to find open educational resources, but I still don't know where to look. That's okay, because now we're going to review some options for OER repositories you can use to find resources for your classes. The first repository I'd like to highlight is the Open Textbook Library. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Textbook Network, a group started by the University of Minnesota, and the resources housed on the Open Textbook Library are largely college-level textbooks. The reason I wanted to highlight the Open Textbook Library first is because of its easy-to-use interface and search features. When looking for textbooks on this repository, you can search in the bar on the top right if you're looking for a specific topic, or you can browse by general subject area. Once you find something, how do you know if you have the right book for you? Well, you'll need to evaluate it for yourself, just like you would with any other textbook, but the Open Textbook Library also allows you to read reviews from faculty who have already adopted these books in their classes. For example, this introductory business book has nine reviews available to read online, and you can also see the names, positions, and institutions of the faculty who reviewed the book. Having access to chapter lists, book summaries, and reviews makes the Open Textbook Library one of the most user-friendly OER repositories online today. If you're interested in finding supplemental materials, individual textbook chapters, or even lecture recordings, OER Commons is another great repository for finding a plethora of open educational resources online. OER Commons has a huge selection of materials available, but this also makes them more difficult to sort through than the resources available from the Open Textbook Library. For one thing, the resources on OER Commons are much less likely to have user reviews available, and because the resources can be anything from an informational website to full lecture recordings, what you find in your subject area may vary wildly from what you intended to find in the first place. Still, there are some great resources available here, and it's a good place to start. Now that we've covered a couple of places to go to look for OER, let's look at how you can evaluate these resources. Although some repositories, like the Open Textbook Library, provide faculty reviews of open educational resources, you can't assume that there will be reviews available on the resources you're interested in. Because of this, understanding how to evaluate OER yourself is really important. First, you'll want to identify vetted rubrics for evaluating OER. There are a few different examples of these available on our library guide, so you don't have to search blindly. The Achieve and iRubrics forms are especially useful for instructors evaluating OER for the first time. These rubrics ask questions like, who created the resource? Does the information presented in the resource align with your class's learning objectives? Is the resource designed for users at the same level of education as your students? Asking questions like this early on can be a huge help. The second step to evaluating open educational resources is to watch out for red flags. This goes hand in hand with the earlier evaluation, but requires a little bit more review on your part. Questions to ask include, does the resource have any typos, and when was the last time the resource was updated? Although these issues might not indicate that a resource is low quality, it can help determine if the resource you're considering is right for your class, or if it needs to be updated or adapted. Finally, after evaluating the resources you have compiled, create a list of your best options and determine which of these would be best for you to use in your class. Like I mentioned earlier in this video, it can be difficult to locate high quality open educational resources online. Using rubrics and searching on well curated repositories like the open textbook library and OER Commons can help make things easier, but you still might have issues locating exactly what you need. Contact your librarian for help or visit our research guide on OER if you have any questions.