Abstract:

The so-called Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm. Very often, OER are located in digital libraries or repositories. Digital repositories can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. These information retrieval systems are able to exchange information with each other through interoperability and sustainability. Some repositories allow the users to create personal collections of learning materials available in the collection that they wish to collect and organize under a specific theme, topic, or label. A personal collection, for example, can be used to save a set of learning materials related to a topic in a course. Moreover, if the repository allows the definition of strategic elements of a course (e.g., prerequisites, approach and outcomes, assessment, etc.), then the collection becomes a course e-portfolio. Though the usefulness of such personal collections and e-portfolios is unquestionable for the respective author, there is a concern when evaluating if the collection is shareable by other users, as this is also an objective of the repository’s supporting institution. MERLOT (Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, www.merlot.org ) is an online repository where its partners and members are devoted to identifying, peer reviewing, organizing and making available existing online learning resources in a range of academic disciplines for its use by higher education faculty and students. MERLOT includes amongst its materials Bookmark Collections and Course e-Portfolios created by its users. This article concerns the usefulness of the MERLOT Bookmark Collections and Course e-Portfolios in engineering education for users different from the authors. At the Engineering collection of MERLOT, there exist at least 752 Bookmark Collections and 61 Course e-Portfolios. A critical review of such materials from the point of view of external users is presented in this contribution. The main assessment criteria are the correct assignment of materials and collection with the respective engineering discipline and sub-discipline (mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc.) and the precision of the description of the collection. Results show that the quality of these collections could be improved, as a percentage of the collections and e-portfolios are not allocated in the correct engineering discipline, some other were created only as a proof, or some are of low added value for users other than the author. The paper could be of interest to those readers that want to promote the use of OER in engineering education.

Keywords:

Open Educational Resources, Engineering Education, MERLOT, e-portfolio.