Quality assurance for open educational resources: The OER trust framework

Abstract

Learning Objects have met some barriers to their development and effective adoption, which varied from the lack of quality assurance mechanisms to the impossibility of editing and adapting most of them to real teaching and learning contexts. However, with the advent of OER (Open Educational Resources), if the later problem - to retain, reuse and even remix learning content - was meant to be solved, the same could not be said for the first one. Quality assurance is still an unsolved problem in this context, even more complex due to the possibility of versioning and collaborative design brought by OER. Thus, it is necessary to propose validation mechanisms for them, at least establishing some guarantees about their functionality and quality. In this sense, this work aims to discuss OERTrust, a proposal of supporting framework for OER validation and testing process, considering both versioning and remixing features. OERTrust is based on the principles of validation and testing that come from Software Engineering area and relies on fuzzy logic to define the importance and influence of different tests to each kind of OER.