OER curation

What is OER Curation?

Definition and scope

OER curation is the purposeful selection, organization, evaluation, and ongoing maintenance of openly licensed educational resources to support teaching and learning. It goes beyond simply collecting materials; it involves assessing alignment with learning outcomes, ensuring accuracy, tracking licenses, and preserving resources for long-term reuse. Curation encompasses a range of materials—from open textbooks and modular course components to multimedia, datasets, activities, and assessments—and it covers multiple subject areas, languages, and formats. The lifecycle includes updating content, documenting provenance, and adapting resources to different educational contexts while maintaining open licensing and interoperability.

In practice, curation teams work across institutions, repositories, and networks to assemble coherent collections that teachers can readily integrate into curricula. Roles may include librarians, instructional designers, subject matter experts, and technologists who collaborate to ensure that resources are reliable, up-to-date, and pedagogically meaningful. The focus is on sustainable access, discoverability, and reuse across borders, platforms, and learning environments.

Why curate OER?

Curating OER delivers tangible benefits for educators, learners, and systems. It helps guarantee quality and relevance, clarifies licensing and reuse rights, and improves the ease with which instructors can find and adapt materials. Curated OER supports equity by reducing cost barriers and enabling learning resources to be localized for different contexts and languages. It also enhances interoperability, allowing resources to be combined into diverse course designs and teaching approaches. Finally, curation fosters trust in open ecosystems by providing governance, provenance, and ongoing stewardship that sustain access over time.

To illustrate the value, consider a teacher designing a unit on climate science who needs openly licensed simulations, readings, and problem sets aligned to local standards. A curated collection not only surfaces suitable materials but also shows licensing terms, version histories, accessibility considerations, and suggested activities, saving time and reducing risk of using outdated or inappropriate resources.

Core Principles of OER Curation

Quality and reliability

Quality and reliability are foundational. Resources should be accurate, up-to-date, and vetted for scope, depth, and alignment with learning objectives. Curators apply evaluation rubrics, seek peer input, verify authorship and provenance, and maintain version control. Transparency about the resource’s origins, revision history, and endorsements helps educators judge suitability for their contexts. Consistent quality also supports learner trust and reduces the cognitive load of selecting materials from a crowded landscape.

Licensing and rights

Clear licensing and rights management are essential for open reuse. Curators confirm that resources are openly licensed, document license terms, and communicate any restrictions. They track license compatibility for adaptations and derivatives, ensuring that licenses permit redistribution, modification, and non-commercial or commercial use as appropriate. Metadata should explicitly record license type, jurisdictional considerations, and any attribution requirements, so teachers can confidently reuse and remix materials.

Accessibility and inclusivity

Accessibility and inclusivity ensure that resources serve all learners. This means considering alternatives for visual or hearing impairments, providing captions and transcripts, ensuring keyboard navigability, and supporting assistive technologies. Materials should be linguistically accessible, culturally inclusive, and designed with universal design principles in mind. By prioritizing accessible formats and inclusive examples, curators expand opportunities for learners with diverse backgrounds and abilities to engage meaningfully with content.

Curation Workflow

Sourcing and assessment

Sourcing strategies draw on repositories, institutional collections, publisher partnerships, and community contributions. Assessment involves screening for licensing, relevance to curricular goals, accuracy, and accessibility. Curators may apply a lightweight triage to reject clearly unsuitable items and then conduct deeper reviews of candidates that pass initial checks. Piloting resources in real teaching contexts can reveal practical concerns about integration, comprehension, and applicability.

Organization and metadata

Effective organization relies on structured metadata and consistent tagging. Key fields include title, author/creator, license, date, subject, educational level, learning outcomes, prerequisites, format, and accessibility notes. Adopting standards such as Dublin Core, LRMI, and schema.org helps with machine readability and cross-platform interoperability. Versioning, provenance notes, and curator decisions should be documented to support ongoing maintenance and trust in the collection.

Taxonomies and collections enable targeted discovery. Curators group resources into thematic bundles, courses, or competency-based pathways, linking related items and providing guidance on suggested pedagogical uses. Regular audits keep metadata accurate and resources aligned with current standards and curricula.

Publication and discoverability

Publication involves making curated resources available through repositories, catalogs, and learning platforms. Discoverability is enhanced with clear descriptions, concise summaries, keyword tagging, and interoperable metadata. Providing context—such as suggested activities, learning outcomes, and assessment alignments—helps educators see the value quickly. It is also important to expose proper citations and persistent identifiers to support reuse in scholarly and instructional contexts.

Tools & Platforms

Repositories and catalogs

Repositories and catalogs serve as the primary homes for curated OER. Choices range from institutional repositories to public OER platforms and federated catalogs. Pros and cons vary: centralized platforms can offer strong discovery tools and governance, while federated or interoperable systems support wider reach and resilience. When selecting platforms, consider licensing clarity, metadata support, accessibility, user community, and sustainability.

Metadata standards and interoperability

Interoperability rests on adopting shared metadata standards. Common frameworks include Dublin Core, Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), and schema.org annotations. Techniques such as OAI-PMH enable metadata harvesting, while persistent identifiers like DOIs aid stability. Using interoperable metadata ensures that resources remain discoverable across platforms and over time, facilitating reuse and remixing across contexts and languages.

Metadata & Accessibility

Describing resources

Descriptive metadata should cover essential details: title, author, publisher, date, license, format, educational level, learning outcomes, and usage notes. Descriptions should be accurate, concise, and free of jargon. Controlled vocabularies and standard terms improve searchability, while clear licensing information helps educators understand reuse rights at a glance.

Accessibility checks and formats

Accessibility checks verify that resources support diverse learning needs. This includes ensuring semantic structure, meaningful headings, alternative text for images, captions or transcripts for multimedia, and keyboard-friendly interfaces. Offering multiple formats (HTML, accessible PDFs, EPUB) and ensuring compatibility with screen readers and other assistive technologies broadens access and reduces barriers to learning.

Licensing, Rights & Attribution

Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons licenses provide standardized terms for open use. Common licenses include CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, and CC0, each with varying permissions for adaptation, commercial use, and redistribution. When curating or publishing, select licenses that align with your openness goals and clearly communicate restrictions or allowances to users. Document decisions about license selection in the resource metadata to guide future users and contributors.

• CC BY: attribution required, allows remix and commercial use
• CC BY-SA: attribution required, share alike for derivatives
• CC BY-NC: attribution required, non-commercial use
• CC BY-ND: attribution required, no derivatives allowed
• CC0: no rights reserved, maximum openness

Attribution practices

Attribution guidelines should specify who created the resource, the title, the license, the source, and the date. Provide a recommended attribution statement and ensure it remains with the content when remixed or redistributed. When possible, include machine-readable attribution metadata to support automated recognition by learning platforms and search tools.

Quality Assurance & Evaluation

Review processes

Quality assurance combines formal reviews and ongoing feedback. Peer reviews, editorial checks, and community input help identify inaccuracies, outdated information, and gaps. Version control, change logs, and transparent decision records support accountability and continuous improvement. Documentation of evaluation criteria helps other editors reproduce assessments and maintain consistency across the repository.

Community involvement

Engaging the community strengthens legitimacy and breadth of expertise. Involve teachers, librarians, students, and subject matter experts through advisory boards, open calls for contributions, and collaborative editorial decisions. Clear governance, transparent processes, and accessible channels for reporting issues build trust and encourage sustained participation.

Measuring Impact

Usage metrics

Usage data, while respecting privacy, informs impact. Metrics such as downloads, views, course enrollments, and resource integrations reveal reach and adoption. Qualitative feedback from educators and learners complements quantitative data, offering insights into usability, relevance, and learning outcomes. Triangulating data helps identify successful practices and areas needing improvement.

Quality metrics and attribution

Quality metrics assess usefulness and alignment with outcomes, accessibility compliance, and accuracy. Attribution quality—ensuring correct licensing statements and proper credit—supports transparency and trust. Collecting data on how often resources are remixed or adapted provides a proxy for impact and can guide future curation priorities.

Challenges & Risks

Misinformation and quality gaps

Misinformation and outdated content pose risks in open ecosystems. Curators must stay vigilant, verify claims against authoritative sources, and implement living documents that can be updated as new evidence emerges. Regular metadata renewal and community review help close quality gaps and prevent the proliferation of incorrect or obsolete materials.

License compliance and sustainability

Maintaining license compliance requires ongoing attention as content evolves. Sustainability concerns include platform funding, governance, and long-term preservation. Strategies such as community stewardship, diversified hosting, and clear licensing policies contribute to durable access and ongoing openness, even as technologies and platforms change.

Case Studies & Examples

Notable repositories and initiatives

Several repositories exemplify thoughtful curation practices. OpenStax, MERLOT, LibreTexts, OER Commons, and OpenLearn illustrate different models of governance, metadata implementation, and community engagement. These initiatives demonstrate how curated collections can scale, preserve quality, and support diverse learning needs across regions and languages.

Open education case highlights

Open education case highlights show successful adoption of open textbooks, collaborative authoring, and cross-border sharing of curricular resources. Highlights include open licensing migrations, standardized metadata adoption, and governance structures that balance author rights with public accessibility. These cases offer practical lessons for building sustainable, high-impact OER ecosystems.

Trusted Source Insight

Trusted Source Insight provides a concise summary of UNESCO’s stance on OER, along with a link to the source. The exact URL is linked here: https://unesco.org.

UNESCO emphasizes openly licensed educational resources to expand access and equity. It highlights quality, interoperability, and clear licensing as critical for sustainable OER ecosystems and cross-border collaboration. Effective curation should align with educational goals and standards to maximize impact.