Wow, thanks for the great post and comments. I want to point back to Derek's provocative statement about accrediting Open Education Resources, and push Leigh's questions a bit further.
When we talk about “accrediting” open educational resources, what do we mean?
I am assuming that is has something to do with assuring quality. I suppose that there are a whole lot of quality assurance models in education. Many governments become involvement with quality assurance through public agencies, there are also regional and professional accreditation processes that strive to ensure institutional and curricular quality. I suppose that most colleges and universities have internal processes in which they “accredit” learning materials, but I think that it is usually pretty contextual. That is, factors such as teaching methods, characteristics of learners, level of the course within an overall curriculum, educational commitments of the institution, department, and faculty are taken into account together and not disaggregated. In many settings this happens within a college, department, and/or at the individual level f the faculty member - not so much by individual students. That said, in the bigger picture, I suppose that individual learners do make decisions based on their perceptions of quality and value.
In any event, it seems that it is perhaps a bit inappropriate to “accredit” Open Educational Resources in the same way that we quality assure academic programs or course instances. It seems to me though that there are characteristics that have little to do with the “content” in terms of its accuracy, relevance, logic, meaning, etc, but does have to do with other important qualities such as ability easily find, access, use, modify, and reuse the OER. Are these qualities that might be assured or at least described?
If so, how might we promote such qualities without impeding velocity?
I raise this because I think that it might be helpful to have some method to identify OER (define this as broadly as you like) that is most “usable” and “useful,” taking into account factors such as licensing, adherence to open formatting and packaging standards, and other characteristics that promote modification, reuse, and sharing (for as wide a group as possible).
Cheers – Ken
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