Quality Assurance of Open Educational Resources

Abstract

The lack of transparency of the quality of Open Educational Resources (OER) is often seen as a barrier to the wider adoption, use, sharing, and further development of OER in the practice of teaching and learning in ODDE. Following the UNESCO Recommendation on OER, this chapter starts providing an overview of quality assurance systems from an international perspective, and the perceptions of faculty members on OER quality. Then, based on an empirical study, a quality framework and validated instrument for the evaluation and quality assessment of OER is presented – the Instrument for Quality Assurance of OER (IQOER). The second part of the chapter looks at how such an instrument can be integrated into a quality assurance process that takes into account the different goals, roles, and functions of the stakeholders involved. It becomes clear that a cultural change toward Open Educational Practice (OEP) is also needed to reach a wider acceptance of OER.

he work described in this publication is partly derived from the project “Digital educational architectures: Open learning resources in distributed learning infrastructures – EduArc” funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (grant #16DHB2129).