Peer Review

Course material evaluation worksheet

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: Feb 3, 2026 by Faculty Development

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

The Course Material Evaluation Worksheet v1.0 is a structured rubric created by Anita R. Walz at Virginia Tech for evaluating textbooks, OERs, and other course materials. It provides a systematic way to assess coverage, accuracy, usability, accessibility, adaptability, and authority. The tool draws from several leading OER evaluation frameworks (Open SUNY, Rebus, Open Textbook Library, AAUP) and is available in both PDF and editable Excel formats. It can be used for faculty peer review, instructional design quality checks, or library OER curation.

Type of Material:

Assessment Tool

Rubric / Evaluation Worksheet (Printable or Digital Template)

Recommended Uses:

Faculty or librarian use; OER workshops; course design or curriculum review committees.

Technical Requirements:

No special plug-ins required. Accessible via standard browsers; available as downloadable PDF and Excel formats.

Identify Major Learning Goals:

Evaluate academic or instructional materials using defined quality criteria.
Identify strengths and areas for improvement in course resources.
Apply standards of accessibility, clarity, and authority in resource evaluation.

Target Student Population:

Graduate School, Professional

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

This rubric requires some basic knowledge of Creative Commons licenses, college curriculum design, and assessment.

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

The rubric provides a fairly expansive series of categories to evaluate OER with useful external resources at the end of the document and most of the rating criteria possess easy inter-rating and intra-rating constitency.

Extremely well-organized, concise, and grounded in established peer review practices. References multiple respected OER evaluation frameworks, providing strong research support. The categories are comprehensive and applicable to nearly any educational resource type.

Concerns:

Some of the rating categories possess ambiguous and highly subjective language that need to be defined in some way on the rubric. What is an "appropriate chapter length"? What is an "appropriate reading level"? Is "bias" the same thing as "professional language"? Is "bias" an appropriate category for critical theory, hermeneutics, or other approaches that foreground values -- and thus bias -- in their analysis?

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

Highly adaptable for faculty training, peer review exercises, or program-level quality assessments. Clear categories guide evaluators to analyze both content and design. Promotes critical thinking about instructional quality.

This is certainly a very thorough rubric for evaluating OER content, and utilizes categories and ratings for evaluation that many faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and scholars might find useful for evaluating OER.

Concerns:

While this rubric does not identify prerequisite knowledge or learning objectives, it might be useful to have a subheading to identify the audience to ensure that it is posed to an audience with the proper prerequisite knowledge.

Could benefit from an optional example or completed sample for first-time users to model the process.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

The design is easy to understand and to work through.

Available in multiple formats (editable and printable). Layout is intuitive with strong visual hierarchy and readable fonts. The open licensing ensures frictionless use and sharing.

Concerns:

Minor formatting improvements could enhance readability in the Excel version (e.g., locking headers or providing alternating row shading).

Other Issues and Comments:: This is an exemplary, openly licensed evaluation tool that synthesizes best practices in curriculum and resource assessment. It is ready-to-use, highly adaptable, and contributes meaningfully to open education quality assurance efforts. Its dual availability (PDF and editable formats) enhances usability and inclusivity.
Creative Commons: