Open Educational Resources (OER) allow instructors, learners, and instructional designers to use others’ contributions to their teaching and learning legally. Not all OER are created equally in terms of quality, content, and permission of reusing or remixing it. The Digital Media Checklist works as a rubric that allows the evaluation of digital content. While completing the LDT300x course, various OER to be used or developed can be evaluated using this checklist.

 

The lesson learned from developing and applying the Digital Media Checklist is that all OER are not equally designed. The checklist consolidates the criteria that can be used in evaluating digital content. The checklist developed here includes criteria that are required to ensure the intended use of the OER to enhance the learning experience. The key criteria that are applied in this Digital Media Checklist to determine if the digital content will support a learning objective include credibility, relevance, accessibility, licensing, accuracy, production quality, and interactivity. The checklist is created in MS Word which makes it easy to use for all. The checklist is saved as a PDF on the portfolio so that peers and instructors can access it for review.

 

The course learning objective to describe teaching frameworks that support active learning will be supported by the selected OER. The OER aims to describe teaching frameworks that support active learning in the classrooms. Applying the Digital Media Checklist, the OER in discussion has scored 17 out of 20. Some of its setbacks include the unavailability of multiple formats of the resource, the images not having alt-text, also there is no easy assessment/quiz to test the understanding of the learners. There are no video or audio media used in the OER. The links are used in a meaningful context within the material.