Abstract:

Open Educational Resource (OER) refer to a movement aimed at offering licensed educational materials for free use. An OER license may contain the right to own a material or other rights, such as the right to modify a material, combine it with other materials to produce new materials, copy the content of the material, or redistribute the material. OERs are usually distributed on the internet via Open Educational Resource Repositories (OERR), which are systems developed to manage the inclusion, storage, and access to OER and its use licenses. OERs encompass any type of artifact used to teach and promote learning, such as videos, images, illustrations, animations, slides, texts, books, lesson schedules, and educational software.

The main advantage of OERs is that they allow free access to knowledge, which contributes to a more inclusive and democratic education. Additional advantages include:
(1) the reduction of educational costs for students and teachers,
(2) the potential improvement of educational materials, and
(3) the faster dissemination of knowledge.

The OER movement has its roots in movements such as the open-source software movement and the open courseware movement.

Currently, there are numerous OERR, which makes the task of locating an OER a challenging and complex problem. The ease or difficulty of locating a resource within the wide universe of OERR is an important factor in the popularization and success of OERs in educational practice. This study investigates the difficulties of locating OERs by conducting a literature review of this subject. This article describes the method used and analyzes and discusses the results of this research.

The study identifies and describes the problems that make it difficult to locate OERs and concludes that this problem is far from having a satisfactory solution. The dispersion of OERs among the numerous repositories, which is associated with the lack of standardization of search engines, either in the interface or in the exposure of resources via metadata, has made it difficult to locate resources and consequently, has negatively affected the popularization and successful use of OERs in educational practice.

Keywords:

Open Educational Resource, Open Educational Resource Repositories, Search.