Towards Assessment of Open Educational Resources and Open Courseware Based on a Socio-constructivist Quality Model

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we introduce a rubric for assessing quality of open educational resources and open courseware based on our socio-constructivist quality model (QORE) that includes 70 criteria grouped in four categories related with content, instructional design, technology, and courseware evaluation. Quality is assessed from an educational point of view, i.e. how useful are such resources for various actors involved in educational processes taken into account their goals, objectives, abilities etc. QORE's focus is on the resources' potential to act as true open educational content available online that has a genuine educational value in this context. Several challenges of using this rubric for evaluation of such educational resources are discussed as well. Keywords.open courseware, open educational resources, quality assurance, quality criteria, quality model, quality rubric IntroductionQuality assurance of educational content is seen conventionally as being the responsibility of subject and instructional experts, but in the context of Open Educational Resources (OERs), OpenCourseWare (OCW), and Web 2.0, guaranteeing quality seems more and more a community endeavor based on the collaboration between experts in education, subject scholars, students, teachers, developers etc. both during and after the teaching and learning process through study groups and practice communities around the world [1]. Consequently, sense of community becomes more and more present in quality models of Web 2.0 applications and special focus has to be on user-centered, participatory nature of these emergent applications. However, such collaborative efforts are very difficult to undertake in absence of appropriate models, frameworks, and tools for evaluating quality of OERs and OCW, yet for the time being, no quality assurance framework that could provide support for various categories of users (learners, instructors, designers, faculty, evaluators etc.) is available. In this paper we introduce a rubric for assessing OERs and OCW based on our socio-constructivist quality model, called QORE, which includes 70 criteria grouped in four categories related with content, instructional design, technology and courseware evaluation. QORE had been introduced in [2], put to work in [3][4][5][6][7], and refined further for this work according with what we have learned from those use experiences. The paper is structured follows: the next section presents the related work, the third one introduces a detailed rubric for assessing quality of OERs and OCW that is based on our quality model, and the last one includes a discussion on the challenges of using this rubric, along with some conclusions and future work ideas. Related WorkWe overview here the related work and, because in terms of rubrics for OERs and OCW there are only very few similar works, we approach it in a larger sense of rubrics for learning objects and online courses as well. Thus,in [8,9,10] the authors show that quality of learning objects may be improved by better educating their...

Evaluación de la formación eLearning en el Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública: resultados del estudio MEEL

“…este instrumento se desarrolló con la finalidad de adaptarse a diversas propuestas metodológicas online, a partir de la aportación de varios autores (Graham et al, 2001;Karjalainen y Rytkönen-suontausta, 2007;ejarque et al, 2008;Ardila-Rodríguez, 2011;AenoR, 2012;Vladoiu y constantinescu, 2013). el instrumento consiste en una lista de verificación o check-list agrupadas en seis dimensiones: planificación y funcionamiento -presentación e información sobre la formación, metas y objetivos, organización del curso, actividades y adaptación a los usuarios-; objetivos de aprendizaje -relevancia, pertinencia, cantidad y accesibilidad-; transferencia -diseño de la transferencia-; metodología -coherencia-; evaluación -evaluación y transparencia-; y dinamización y seguimiento -claridad y utilidad de sus comunicaciones, seguimiento e interacción con el grupo-.…”