Quality Assurance for OER

Work in progress, expect frequent changes. Help and feedback is welcome. See discussion page.

(: Please add your input for expanding any of the above, or add a new category to this list. If you wish to include your name and email, then I’m pleased to attribute your input. With many thanks
Paul Kawachi - Email: kawachi@open-ed.net)

Quality Assurance for OER

What aspects should be considered?

Dear Colleagues, I am trying to formulate a quality assurance framework for OER authors, and you are invited to offer critique and suggest ideas to improve this. You may have suggestions for component sentences to be included into a category, or suggest a new category. For instance UNESCO (2002, p.1) and Wiley & Green (2012, p.81) expand on the cost aspect to suggest Creative Commons licences should be used where the OER is not fully in the public domain and instead some restrictions apply.

Can we discuss these ideas summarised below ?

Categories

The following categories are so far accumulated:

(a) Discoverability (metadata tags, author tags, end-user social tags, languages)

• Please see "TEMOA.info Open Educational Resources (OER) Portal" study case at page 182 in the Compendium (written in English, Spanish and Portuguese)
  http://oportunidadproject.eu/resources/compendium.html
  
• content or comments go here

(b) Searchability (text and non-text cues)

• content or comments go here

(c) Accessibility (cost, localised to end-user culture and context)

• content or comments go here

(d) Portability (take-away, downloadable, printable, re-storable)

• content or comments go here

(e) Instructional Design (overview, study guide, learning objective)

• content or comments go here

(f) Content (local, expert quality, level, interactivity, student-created, co-created)

• content or comments go here

(g) Inclusive (voice, gender, ethnicities, minorities, disabilities, face validities)

• content or comments go here

(h) Learning Assessment (built-in self-assessment, external accreditation)

• Please read "Open Learning Recognition and assessment methods" in the OERTest project (EU), http://efquel.org/open-learning-recognition-taking-open-educational-resources-a-step-further/
  
• content or comments go here

(i) Technical (adaptability, media choice, transmissibility, stability)

• content or comments go here

(j) Artistic (theme music, white space, media aesthetics)

• content or comments go here

(k) Usability (fit-for-purpose, reliable, clear, concise, coherent)

• content or comments go here

(l) Learning Support (learning pathways, navigation aids)

• content or comments go here

(m) Other (dated, up-to-date, brand, interesting, fun, offline study guide)

• content or comments go here

(n)External support (online and offline groups, tutoring, counselling)

• content or comments go here

(o) Social responsibility

Media choice for OER is important for social equality or maybe equity here. Gary Boyd (1989, p.227) writing in that seminal text Mindweave pointed out that the early medium used by the Open University mismatched to the communicative style of a large proportion of the intended students. Television was passive one-way media, while many of the working students at the time habitually used body gestures in their daily lives. As a result from successfully completing the OU television-delivered course, “they are likely to become estranged from their native culture rather than being enabled to help its evolution". Thus the transformative intent of OER reaching minorities and the poor may be undermined by the media choice.

Boyd, G.M. (1989). The life-worlds of computer-mediated distance education. In R. Mason & A. Kaye (Eds.), Mindweave : Communication, computers and distance education, (pp. 225-227). Oxford : Pergamon Press.