Towards the establishment of an agile method for OERs development and delivery

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OERs) have been emerged as an important mechanism for democratization of access to education. In fact, the free and open distribution of these resources contributes with the dissemination of knowledge and facilitates the access to information, benefiting the society as a whole. Similar to software, the development of OERs requires the application of appropriate methods and practices to ensure the productivity and quality of the resulting products. Agile methods seem to be an interesting approach in this perspective. However, initiatives to foster the development and delivery of quality and reliable OERs, according to agile principles and with reduced costs, are still incipient. In our work we discuss the establishment of an agile method for the development and delivery of OERs. The proposed method is based on the main characteristics, practices and principles of well-known agile methods for software. To illustrate our ideas, the method is discussed in terms of its application in the development of an OER in the FLOSS (Free / Libre and Open Source Software) domain.