Students as Experts-In-Training for Quality Assessment of Computer Science OERs

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that are freely accessible and openly licensed, allowing users to use, adapt, and redistribute them with few or no restrictions. This article presents a quality evaluation experience over a set of OERs, a prior step to a clusterization process based on specific criteria. The evaluators have been students, from a teacher training master's program, that were instructed in concepts related to Open Learning, digital educational repositories, design and production processes for digital educational materials, and OER quality standards. The experiment consisted of evaluating the OERs stored in an online repository called Procomun, resources associated with the discipline of Computer Science. The resources have been created by both professionals and the students themselves, with the aim of comparing production quality levels and various specific criteria between them. For this purpose, two types of evaluations were carried out. First, the quality of the repository’s semantic tagging, based on the Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard, was assessed using the Metadata Quality Assessment Model. Second, the UNE 71362 standard was applied to a selected collection of OERs obtaining a set of spider diagrams. Finally, to evaluate the value of the quality assessment itself, two types of processes were carried out: students acted as evaluators of the resources they had produced themselves (as a self-assessment task), and peer assessment was also carried out by other students. The article describes the entire experience, the evaluation process, the quality framework and the results obtained in the experimentation.