EVALUATION AND COMPARISON OF EIGHT OPEN COURSEWARE BASED ON A QUALITY MODEL

Abstract

Despite the magnitude, pervasiveness, and impact of the open educational resources and open courseware movement on users worldwide, there is yet no quality assessment framework that could provide support for OCW/OER users. Thus, learners need guidance for choosing the most appropriate educational resources that fulfills their educational needs, while instructors are interested in support for instructional activities, which provide for achievement of learning goals, objectives, and outcomes, along with reflective learning. Developers need guidelines for designing and building such educational resources, while faculty or institutions that are or want to become involved in the open courseware movement may be interested in the challenges and rewards of this process. Though, there is preoccupation about articulating a set of criteria for quality assessment, which may be used to support construction, evaluation and comparison of open courseware and open educational resources and repositories. However, the related work is extremely thin, with just a few works approaching the general subject of quality of open courseware and OERs in the context of assessing the impact of these paradigms in education nowadays. In this paper we evaluate and compare quality-wise eight open courseware on databases offered by different major open courseware providers that comply with different open courseware paradigms. The comparison is guided by our set of socio-constructivist quality criteria, which has been introduced in our previous works, and that serve as general guidelines for development, use, modification, evaluation, and comparison of open courseware and OERs. Moreover, this work attempts to work those quality criteria on the chosen open courseware, and to learn, based on this experience, how to develop further the initial set of quality criteria.