A QUALITY ASSURANCE FRAMEWORK FOR OERs BASED ON QUALITY SEALS AND THE PHOTODENTRO SEALS REPOSITORY

Abstract

"Open Educational Resources (OERs) offer unique opportunities to enhance the quality of education and ensure equitable access to learning resources. A major concern, however, is the quality of OERs. This article presents a generic conceptual framework for the Quality Assurance (QA) of OERs based on Quality Seals and introduces the Photodentro Quality Seals (QS) Repository and e-service (photodentro.edu.gr/seals), which was initiated and developed to support the quality assurance processes of the Greek national digital OER repositories for primary and secondary education. The proposed QA framework is based on three main entities: Quality Seals (describing either a set of quality criteria, a well-defined quality assurance procedure, or a reliable source of origin); Quality Seal holders (e.g., OER certifiers); and Sealings (representing e.g. certificates for OERs). The Photodentro QS repository hosts and manages Quality Seals and Sealings for OERs, which reside on various OER repositories, and provides a registry of OER certifiers. Our experiences from its nationwide use are also discussed."