Abstract:

Discovering a language Open Educational Resource (OER) of good quality is a big challenge for language teachers especially nowadays in the age of the COVID-19 . Millions of language teachers worldwide are constrained to deliver their language lessons online and they need quality digital language material that is openly accessible. Even though the number and variety of educational resources available in the form of OERs in several OER repositories and directories is wide, their quality is not guaranteed so standards for selecting OERs are needed. One other point that needs to be considered, is the dynamic and open feature of OERs because they can be adapted and further developed with no limitations as long as the open licenses allow it. In order to facilitate the process of their continuous improvement quality assurance procedures need to be adopted. That means that it's highly crucial for language users to be able to discover, use, re-use, and share educational material of good quality. The 2012 Paris OER Declaration in the article “I” encourages all member States to facilitate finding, retrieving, and sharing of OERs as well as adopting appropriate quality open standards to ensure interoperability and to facilitate the use of OERs in diverse media (UNESCO, 2012).

But how can a language teacher evaluate a language OER? Are there any specific evaluation tools? Are there any OER repositories that offer OER of high or good quality, and if yes, which quality assurance guidelines did they adopt? Is there any quality assessment tool for language OER?

In the context of the Erasmus+ project “OPEN Languages and Cultures Network” (OPENLang Network: https://www.openlangnet.eu/ ) it has been developed an open online and collaborative language learning environment that offers a variety of OER services such as a rich repository of language OERs as well as the possibility to add and evaluate a language OER.

This paper aims first at presenting the research that has been conducted in order to explore and answer the research questions aforementioned and then envisages to introduce the “Language OER Quality Framework” that has been developed by the consortium in order to address the quality needs of the OPENLang Network platform. An evaluation tool for OERs will be also presented with the aim to a) facilitate the online evaluation of the OERs by the language teachers who wish to upload their language OERs to the OPENLang platform and b) to promote quality assurance practices.

The research results have shown that the quality assurance of open educational resources (OERs) is quite complex and challenging and that there are several options available for educators and institutions for the evaluation of the digital resources that they want to use, reuse, create or share but not many for language OERs.

References:
[1] UNESCO, 2012. The Paris OER Declaration 2012. Retrieved from https://en.unesco.org/oer/paris-declaration

Keywords:

Quality Assessment Framework, OERs, Language OERs.