One of the defining features of open educational resources is permission to engage in revise and remix activities with regard to OER. While those permissions make it possible for us to change and improve OER, they do nothing to tell us which OER to spend our time and energy improving – or how to improve them.
In our work at Lumen, we put a lot of effort into creating scalable processes for empirically determining which OER aren’t sufficiently supporting student learning and then making targeted improvements to those OER. In fact, this is one of the main ways Lumen adds value to the open education community – making data-informed improvements to OER and releasing those improved OER back to the community under an open license.
Many people don’t seem to know about this aspect of our work, so I recently made a < 2-minute video describing how that process works and talking through an example. I’ll share more of these short videos in the future.