Towards a Quality Model for Open Courseware and Open Educational Resources

Seeing the world’s knowledge as a public asset that can be accessed, shared, used and reused, etc. mediated by technology, especially ICT, is a potent idea and it may have an influential impact on educational processes within our society. A decade of development of initiatives that offer open courseware and open educational resources has passed, and all the related projects have contributed to the provision of open university-level digital educational materials. For the time being, there is no articulated set of quality criteria to be used for development, use, modification, evaluation, and comparison of such resources, though, there is concern about this subject. We introduce here a set of criteria for Quality Assurance of open courseware and open educational resources, from a social and constructivist perspective, as a first step towards construction of a quality model. They have been grouped in four categories related with content, instructional design, technology and courseware evaluation.