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

Highlights

• A comprehensive literature review on learning object repositories (LOR) quality approaches.

• Most cited quality approaches are “peer reviews” and “recommendation systems”.

• User-generated, collaborative, quality instruments are favored for their sustainability.

• Main result is a Quality approach framework for LOR design.

Abstract

Today, Open Educational Resources (OER) are commonly stored, used, adapted, remixed and shared within Learning object repositories (LORs) which have recently started expanding their design to support collaborative teaching and learning. As numbers of OER available freely keep on growing, many LORs struggle to find sustainable business models and get the users’ attention. Previous studies have shown that Quality assurance of the LORs is a significant factor when predicting the success of the repository. Within the study, we analysed technology enhanced learning literature systematically regarding LORs’ quality approaches and specific collaborative instruments. This paper’s theoretical contribution is a comprehensive framework of LOR quality approaches (LORQAF) that demonstrates the wide spectrum of possible approaches taken and classifies them. The purpose of this study is to assist LOR developers in designing sustainable quality assurance approaches utilizing full the potential of collaborative quality assurance tools.

Introduction

For the last two decades, a rapidly growing amount of Open Educational Resources (OER) has become available in Learning objects repositories (LORs) for educators to re-use, re-publish and share within their communities, supporting collaborative learning (Dimitriadis, McAndrew, Conole, & Makriyannis, 2009). Smaller OER repositories are built into federated repositories by being harvested for their metadata to improve access to higher numbers of learning objects (Tzikopoulos, Manouselis, & Vuorikari, 2007). Unfortunately, these repositories are not used up to their full potential (Dichev and Dicheva, 2012, Mitchell et al., 2006, Ochoa and Duval, 2009). Thousands of digital resources are created collaboratively and published online every day, and their quality control, assurance and evaluation are of paramount importance for potential users (Downes, 2007, Palavitsinis et al., 2013). OER enable forms of collaborative learning (Dillenbourg, 1999) and LORs of today can be considered as computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments as they provide users tools for posting knowledge productions into a shared working space and providing tools for progressive discourse interaction between the users (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994). Adding social and collaborative features has been a recent trend of LORs to facilitate wider user engagement (Monge et al., 2008, Sánchez-Alonso et al., 2011).

According to previous studies (Attwell, 2005, Barton et al., 2003, Clements and Pawlowski, 2012) quality of OER plays a significant role in the success of the open content repositories (LOR) (Cechinel et al., 2011, Tate and Hoshek, 2009). Therefore, it is vital to study LORs quality approaches (Clements, Pawlowski, & Manouselis, 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. This literature review puts emphasis towards collaborative tools such as peer review (Neven & Duval, 2002), which contribute towards the quality assurance of the repository. CSCL is an emerging research field that focuses on how collaborative learning, supported by technology, can enhance peer interaction and work in groups, and how collaboration and technology facilitate sharing and distributing knowledge and expertise among community members (Lipponen, Hakkarainen, & Paavola, 2004).

Learning object repositories quality approaches have previously been classified as (Pawlowski & Clements, 2010):

• The Generic Approach of Quality standards (e.g. ISO 9000 standards (Stracke, 2009), European Foundation for Quality Management Excellence (European Foundation for Quality Management, 2014).

• Specific Quality Approaches (e.g. Content development criteria or competency requirements) (Leacock & Nesbit, 2007).

• Specific Quality Instruments (e.g. user generated collaborative quality approaches such as rating (Nesbit, Belfer, & Vargo, 2002), peer review (Neven & Duval, 2002) or recommender systems (Manouselis, Kyrgiazos, & Stoitsis, 2014).

In this study, we investigated quality approaches for LORs with a systematic literature review (Kitchenham (2004)) in order to understand the holistic phenomenon of quality assurance comprehensively and to form a quality approaches framework which LOR developers can take into account when designing new repositories as well as improving the quality of the existing ones. The classification above was used to guide our review process as the starting theoretical framework.

This paper is organized as following: In the second section, we describe the main concepts of educational resources and learning object repositories. In the third chapter we define quality approaches around repositories. Chapter four describes the literature review methodology and systematic mapping of quality approaches. Chapter five presents the analysis of the results and the learning object repositories quality assurance framework (LORQAF). The paper concluded with a summary of results clarifying the contributions of this study for theory and practice.