Quality Assurance for OER : Current State of the Art and the TIPS Framework

We present validated quality assurance criteria as guidelines for creating and improving open educational resources (OER). We have reviewed all 45 known related frameworks in the literature, and built an open collation of 205 criteria. Through several rounds of international workshops, questionnaires, surveys and referrals, these have been examined by more than 200 OER experts and teachers around the world to produce a practical framework consisting of 38 key criteria. Through a grounded theory approach, these are distributed among four levels ; the teaching aspects, information content aspects, presentation aspects, and the system technical aspects - giving us the acronym TIPS - for a highly validated (content validity index > 0.80 according to Lawshe) framework as guidelines for determining and improving the quality of OER. These key criteria can be helpful to creators of OER, or easily applied as a rubric to assess or improve existing OER by reusers. All the methods and data are in the free-of-cost open-access domain.