Quality of OER from the Perspective of Lecturers – Online Survey of Quality Criteria for Quality Assurance

Abstract

The trend of digitization at universities has increased as a result of the Corona pandemic. Universities and teachers were forced to undertake a digital restructuring in a short period of time. Teaching had to be digitized, so interest in digital educational materials continued to grow. Open Educational Resources (OER) offer great potential in this context due to their digital format and usability across universities. When using as well as creating such free educational materials, lecturers have to check the quality of the OER due to individual quality requirements. For this reason, special attention should be paid to how quality assurance can be measured. There are already numerous models for quality assurance, which differ in terms of their complexity and level of detail. Zawacki-Richter and Mayrberger have conducted a comparison of these models and developed an adapted model based on their findings. By including lecturers, as a relevant stakeholder group, this model will be verified. Lecturers can be seen as exporters or importers of OER. Whether something is high quality depends on the needs of each user, their tasks and processes, so quality requirements can vary with the respective role. The aim is to investigate which quality criteria lecturers think OER should fulfill in order to be of high quality. For this purpose, an embedded mixed method (EMM) survey of lecturers was conducted, in which the different roles of a lecturer were also distinguished. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.