This paper offers a short evaluation of the variety of quality criteria used in Open Educational Resources and some of the methods and practices in use to ensure quality. The paper surveys and reviews effective practices and technologies used in learning object repositories to more effectively engage educators in providing structured feedback. The aim is to provide a useful resource to repository owners and managers seeking to develop and improve on the services they already offer to educators. An important additional aim is to support teachers in using digital learning resources in the classroom so that the deployment of OER in schools in particular might grow and flourish over the next few years. ‘Quality’ is by no means a simple concept to define in the context of OER repositories and the paper seeks to lay out a number of different ways in which the concept can be analysed and made useful. The paper was produced through a short-term qualitative analysis in which we examined a number of existing OER repositories, a wide range of academic and other writings on the subject, a small number of interviews with key experts and some published slideware relevant to the subject. The paper offers a set of potential further research questions as well as a distillation of a number of ‘actionable points’ that OER leaders might be able to use as starting points for ongoing development work on their own quality assurance systems.

Keywords

quality · quality criteria · quality circle · collective intelligence · evaluation · OER · repository