Why open educational resources repositories fail : the contribution of quality approaches to the success of repositories

Abstract

Over the last two decades, millions of Open Educational Resources (OER) have become freely available for teachers and learners online. These resources are usually accessible through Learning Object Repositories (LORs), which are databases with a user interface. LORs are rarely used to their full potential and often considered as ‘failures’. Previous studies have shown that quality has a critical role in the success of information systems such as LORs. However there are no common guidelines for quality assurance approaches for LORs, nor are there studies into the contribution made by different LOR quality assurance approaches to the success of a repository. Measuring quality and success have proven to be a challenge in the research community due to the subjective and dynamic nature of such concepts. To meet this challenge, this thesis studied the perceptions of LOR users and developers with multiple methodological perspectives. The contribution of this thesis to academic discourse comes from its deepening of the understanding of LOR users’ and developers’ perceptions on the quality and success of repositories. Frameworks for LOR quality assurance approaches and LOR success metrics were developed in order to identify and design approaches that would augment LOR success, as a theoretical contribution. The findings of these studies show that expert reviews combined with user-generated quality approaches (e.g. recommendation systems, peer reviews, commenting, tagging etc.) contribute towards LOR success. The practical contribution of this thesis is a set of recommendations towards the design of LOR quality approaches. These recommendations have already been used as guidelines for creating quality assurance approaches for four major European LORs.