EVALUATION AND DISSEMINATION OF EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS DEVELOPED BY TEACHERS AS OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

Teachers at university usually produce a significant amount of high-quality educational material to be used by students in their face-to-face courses. However, this material is used only by students during the courses taught by the teacher who developed the educational content, and is not shared with other students, both inside and outside the university, through online classes or as Open Educational Resources (OER) because it must adapt to these contexts. Given this situation, our goal is to help professionals who have developed high-quality educational material to share them as Open Educational Resources using a methodology for its evaluation, optimization, implementation, and publication in an open access repository.

The proposed methodology is carried out by a design team (professionals in design, audio-visual production, and visual communication) and the teacher who developed the educational material. The first step of the methodology is an evaluation by the students that assisted the teacher's course to validate different quality criteria of all the educational material used in the class. After the evaluation, the teacher and the design team discuss evaluation’s results, and if necessary, improvements are made to specific educational resources. In the third step, according to defined selection criteria, the most suitable material is selected for its distribution as OER’s. The selected resources are peer-reviewed by other teachers to ensure the quality of its contents. Then, the teacher must identify pedagogical and technical characteristics of the OER; this metadata is filled using a PDF form. Finally, the educational resource is sent, along with the metadata form, to the institutional repository, which uploads the content, and from that moment it is published as an OER.

To validate the proposed approach, we applied it to 1785 educational materials developed for nine high repetition courses from the areas of Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics and Electronics Engineering. This process resulted in the creation of 670 Open Educational Resources. We hope that this methodology will be helpful in other university environments.