Operational instrument for primary assessment of intrinsic quality of open educational resources

Abstract

The open educational resources (OER) are those resources which make reference to categories of educational materials which are in the public domain or which are available to readers by open licenses, so for which the access is free. A few examples of OER are school textbooks, curriculum, syllabi, course supports, audio-video resources. Given the multitude, diversity and complexity of OER, and the fact that many times there are no objective and thorough conventions and regulations of selection, access, filtration and evaluation of them, specific selection and evaluation strategies must be identified. This article is guided by the following questions: a) What are the intrinsic qualities that the web educational resources should have? b) How could we support with instruments the persons interested in the selection, study, and evaluation of web educational resources? Starting from these questions, we offer an operational instrument/checklist of evaluation of the intrinsic quality of OER, and a series of landmarks for the primary evaluation of OER, as a component of the primary evaluation of e-resources.