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Reviewers Needed

January 13, 2019 3 Comments

Photo credit: “Group” by Pixabay user Geralt, Public Domain

Almost a year ago, COERLL launched the Language OER Network, a website that features teachers, students, and staff who are using, creating, and promoting OER. Featured educators receive a badge and are listed on the website under different categories of work: OER Teacher, OER Creator, OER Reviewer, and OER Ambassador. The lists of featured people are growing in every category except one: OER Reviewer.

We encourage teachers to review the free materials they access online, especially if those materials are open educational resources (OER). (We define OER here as any material for teaching and learning that has an open license.) Since OER are self-published, people who use them don’t always know how or if they were reviewed. There is not always a guarantee OER will be high quality.

Many authors of open materials take great care in having their materials vetted: they may work on teams, ask colleagues to proofread, go through a formal review process, or test the materials many times with students before publication. However, not everyone has the time or resources to go through this process. This is where peers can be very helpful in reviewing each others’ content after it has been published.

OER repositories like MERLOT and OER Commons, or even other platforms for sharing copyrighted materials like Teachers Pay Teachers, offer ways to review materials. Often, a user can give a star rating and write a comment. Other platforms have a more involved and formal peer review process. For example, the Open Textbook Library at the University of Minnesota has faculty review open textbooks based on a specified set of criteria, resulting in a comprehensive, multi-paragraph review.

Reviews help add legitimacy to materials posted online, where anyone with an internet connection can publish something. A review can:

  • help teachers sift through a mountain of content to find what is high quality
  • provide useful feedback to content authors
  • offer a forum for teachers to express gratitude to their colleagues for sharing their work
  • ideally, encourage teachers to talk to each other about ideas for teaching and to participate in a community.

If you have used open Creative Commons licensed materials in your teaching (including COERLL’s materials), please consider reviewing them.

How to Write a Review

You can write a review in any public form: a repository like MERLOT or OER Commons (other repositories are listed here), a blog post, or anywhere else you can think of.

We recommend that rather than simply rating an OER with a number of stars and giving a generic response like “great activity”, teachers write a little bit about how they used the materials, how the students reacted, and what specific features worked or did not work.

How to Earn a Badge

Once you have written a review in a public forum, you can apply to receive an OER Reviewer badge from COERLL.

Filed Under: Badges, Methods/Open educational practices (OEP), Open education philosophy, Publishing OER Tagged With: community, expertise, feedback, gratitudue, LOERN, MERLOT, Minnesota, OER, OER Commons, Open Textbook Library, quality, rating, review, reviewer, Teachers Pay Teachers, vetting

Comments

  1. sushumna says

    January 21, 2019 at 9:05 am

    Very happy to review or create OERs in Telugu Language

    Reply
  2. lfranklin says

    January 21, 2019 at 2:43 pm

    Congrats on your TOP 100 Language Learning Blog. That’s a very realistic and impressive badge
    Still using Le Français Interactif at our place.

    Best Regards,

    Laura Franklin
    Professor of French
    Northern Virginia Community College

    Reply
  3. Sarah says

    January 22, 2019 at 12:40 pm

    Thanks Laura! Great to hear from you.

    On the topic of OER reviewers, we would still love to feature you as an OER Reviewer if you are interested in applying 🙂

    Reply
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