Abstract:

Recently, some initiatives have been created to support and improve the effectiveness in the design of an Open Educational Resource (OER). However there has been a little discussion about the features needed to guide teachers in the design of OERs e.g. the web accessibility.

Nowadays the design of an OER is part of the teachers work, but OERs need to have accessibility characteristics so that the contents reach all learners, regardless whether or not they have special needs or limitations for its use. Within the design of an OER there are some stages to follow and one of this is the evaluation stage. It consists of a review of different aspects about the quality and accessibility of an OER.

According to this context, the evaluation strategies used in this work to support teachers in the evaluation process consists of two evaluation instruments:
a) a quality evaluation instrument based on the LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument) and
b) an accessibility evaluation instrument.

In addition, there are two primary aims of this study: the first is to introduce a tool which has been developed in order to allow teachers to evaluate quality and accessibility of an OER in the ATutor learning management system. The second is to present and discuss the results obtained from an application scenario with teachers that evaluated OERs using this tool.

In conclusion, one of the most significant findings to emerge from this work is that for teachers it is so important to receive feedback about the accessibility of their OERs in order to improve its quality and it was possible to identify the accessibility characteristics of an OER in which teachers have most difficulties. Moreover, with the application of the scenario teachers have learnt about the main characteristics to take into account when they are designing an OER.

Keywords:

Open Educational Resource (OER), web accesibility, quality, teacher training, LORI, evaluation.