Not all OER are peer reviewed.  Assessment and review practices are determined by the creator and the institution that is adopting the resource for teaching and learning.   The creator is regarded as the academic content expert and understands the learning objectives, accuracy of content, accessibility, and usability of the content in regard to the targeted course, which means the creator is responsible for academic quality control.  Likewise, the repository or the university accepting the resource may choose to adopt any potential review processes. A university’s academic control guidelines may be used to determine the quality of the product, ensuring it meets required academic standards.  Although the peer review process for OER has the same strengths as the process for academic journals, the nature of OER means that there are some weaknesses as well.

OER Peer review

Strengths

• OER in a repository have met a set of standards for their inclusion.
• Reviewers are qualified.
• Reviewers are typically given guidelines to ensure standardization.

Weaknesses

• OER repositories could post materials that have not yet been peer reviewed.  While they will at some point be reviewed, not every resource will have completed the process upon posting.
• OER continuously evolve, unlike the contents in academic journals.  The peer review that has been completed might not describe the OER in its evolved state.
• Repositories may have difficulty recruiting peer reviewers, which could contribute to the previous two issues.

Example

MERLOT uses a complex peer review system. Each discipline community has an editorial board that sets standards and runs the evaluations for OER in their discipline. Peer reviewers that meet a set of requirements are selected and trained on the reviewing process. OER are assigned two reviewers who each evaluate the OER following their discipline’s standards (most use the MERLOT Peer Review Report). Editors create a composite report and post the report with the OER.

Crowdsourced reviews

As an alternative to peer review, crowdsourcing allows users of OER to provide public reviews after they use them. The quality of these reviews can vary, but if a repository creates a good system for reviews, then they can be a valuable tool for identifying quality.

Strengths

• Can provide multiple perspectives on a given OER.
• Often easier to find reviews of more current versions of the OER.
• If the repository provides a framework or rubric for reviews, then you will know going in what will be covered in the reviews.

Weaknesses

• Any given OER may not have any reviews.
• It is hard to know whether any given reviewer has used the OER or is credible.

Example

The Open Textbook Library will accept any OER that meets their basic 4 criteria for inclusion, none of which require a quality review. Instead, quality is done through reviews by faculty who are members of institutions in the Open Education Network who have use the OER. Reviewers follow a 10-criteria rubric for evaluating the OER covering both the quality of the content and the usability of the resource.

Boulden, M.H. (2023, September 21). Open educational resources (OER) [LibGuide]. Quality Reviews – Open Educational Resources (OER) – Research Guides at University of Memphis Libraries CC BY 4.0