Innovative Practices

OER Discovery: Ensuring that OER Rise to the Top

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Abstract

This paper discusses the challenges of ensuring discoverability of Open Educational Resources (OER) in the absence of clear standards for sharing them. Despite the efforts of librarians and instructors to create a wealth of OER, discoverability remains limited and often relegated to a list of links on a LibGuide. The authors address this challenge by highlighting technical and descriptive barriers to OER discoverability. The authors then describe the development of a hybrid metadata standard for OER and its deployment through the institutional repository. Although provisional, this approach ensures that OER records can be adapted to future metadata standards and exported to third-party repositories. This paper underscores the importance of developing an effective metadata standard for OER to ensure their discoverability for learners and educators.

Keywords: discoverability, metadata standards, cataloging, description, institutional repositories

How to Cite:

Burnett, B., Cannon-Rech, N., Hunnicutt, R. & Mortimore, J., (2023) “OER Discovery: Ensuring that OER Rise to the Top”, Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education 2(1), 222-242. doi: https://doi.org/10.13001/joerhe.v2i1.7879

Rights: © 2023 Beth Burnett, Nikki Cannon-Rech, Rebecca Hunnicutt, and Jeffrey Mortimore. Published under a CC-BY 4.0 license.