Questions of quality in repositories of open educational resources: a literature review

Abstract

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials which are freely available and openly licensed. Repositories of OER (ROER) are platforms that host and facilitate access to these resources. ROER should not just be designed to store this content – in keeping with the aims of the OER movement, they should support educators in embracing open educational practices (OEP) such as searching for and retrieving content that they will reuse, adapt or modify as needed, without economic barriers or copyright restrictions. This paper reviews key literature on OER and ROER, in order to understand the roles ROER are said or supposed to fulfil in relation to furthering the aims of the OER movement. Four themes which should shape repository design are identified, and the following 10 quality indicators (QI) for ROER effectiveness are discussed: featured resources; user evaluation tools; peer review; authorship of the resources; keywords of the resources; use of standardised metadata; multilingualism of the repositories; inclusion of social media tools; specification of the creative commons license; availability of the source code or original files. These QI form the basis of a method for the evaluation of ROER initiatives which, in concert with considerations of achievability and long-term sustainability, should assist in enhancement and development.Keywords: open educational resources; open access; open educational practice; repositories; quality assurance(Published: 24 July 2014)Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2014, 22: 20889 -http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v22.20889

Open educational resources repositories literature review – Towards a comprehensive quality approaches framework

“…Previous studies on LOR have highlighted the issue of quality assurance of repositories, as this is seen as key to provision of quality content to end users (Manouselis & Costopoulou, 2006;Petrides et al, 2008;Atenas & Havemann, 2014). In this study we look at the quality of LORs not only from the perspective of the quality of the OER, but from the perspective of the repository and the services around it.…”

“…Specific quality instruments (Pawlowski & Clements 2010;Atenas & Havemann, 2014;Hylen, 2006) As OER repositories need sustainable solutions for quality assurance (Downes, 2007), specific quality collaborative instruments have become increasingly popular. Unfortunately, in voluntary settings in OER communities, it is not easy to find adequate motivated reviewers unlike in fields like e-commerce.…”

“…Therefore, it is vital to study LORs quality approaches (Clements et al, 2014) in a systematic way. Previous literature reviews on LOR quality approaches have focused on metadata quality only (Palavitsinis et al, 2013) and in the case of Atenas and Havemann (2014) have defined quality approaches quite simply as any approach which might attract users' to re-use content. However, this is the first systematic LOR quality approaches literature review which looks at quality management as a holistic approach around the repository, not only focusing on the quality instruments but also policies, standardization and pre-publication related quality approaches.…”

Aspects of openness in education

“…Such strategies to ensure effective reuse of resources provide an excellent segue to our next article on open educational resources. Atenas and Havemann (2014) discuss open educational resources, in terms of resource-based and creative learning design together with scholarly collaboration, as being key to culture change in academia. The typical constraints on open educational resources are cited Á the lack of incentives to share, the investment in repurposing versus creating, and the uncertainty of contributing enhancements to an open platform.…”

The Role of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in Primary Education in Developing Nations: A Case Study of India

“…for the effectiveness of OER platforms. These include peer review, user evaluation tools, authorship of resources, featured resources, standardized metadata usage, keywords of resources, multilingualism of the repositories, use of social media tools, availability of original files and source code, and specification of the CC license (Atenas & Havemann, 2014). Many of these were recognized by the case study organizations but not many of them were utilized.…”