Questions of Quality in Repositories of Open Educational Resources: A Literature Review. <s> Research in Learning Technology <s> Marshall Smith directs the education program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. A member of the National Academy of Education, he served as a professor and dean at Stanford and as undersecretary of education at the U.S. Department of Education. Catherine Casserly is a program officer with the education program at Hewlett, where she is responsible for the Open Educational Resources Initiative. Prior to joining the Hewlett Foundation, she was the program officer for evaluation for the Walter S. Johnson Foundation and worked as a policy analyst for SRI International. <s> BIB001 </s> Questions of Quality in Repositories of Open Educational Resources: A Literature Review. <s> Research in Learning Technology <s> This paper depicts the sustainability of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in terms of the three models: funding, technical, and content. Discussion and recommendations are focused on the sustainability of OERs and the requirement that we think of OERs as only part of a larger picture – one that includes volunteers and incentives, community and partnerships, co-production and sharing, distributed management and control. <s> BIB002 </s> Questions of Quality in Repositories of Open Educational Resources: A Literature Review. <s> Research in Learning Technology <s> For teachers and learners, the proliferation of Open Educational Resources (OER) in combination with advances in information technologies has meant centralised access to materials and the possibility of creating, using, and reusing OER globally, collaboratively, and across multiple disciplines. Through an examination of a community of author users of the OER portal Connexions, this article explores individual and group authorship, OER use and reuse and the factors contributing to and hindering these practices. As such, the paper sheds light on how OER can be sustained and continuously improved, with an emphasis on the use and reuse of dynamic, relevant, and high quality materials over time. <s> BIB003 </s> Questions of Quality in Repositories of Open Educational Resources: A Literature Review. <s> Research in Learning Technology <s> This paper describes the internal motivations and external drivers that led The Open University UK to enter the field of Open Educational Resources through its institution‐wide OpenLearn initiative (www.open.ac.uk/openlearn). It also describes some of the emerging evidence of the impacts inside and outside the university. Through the rapid implementation and operation of the OpenLearn website, The Open University UK has been able to better understand and promote openness through open and distance learning. <s> BIB004 </s> Questions of Quality in Repositories of Open Educational Resources: A Literature Review. <s> Research in Learning Technology <s> Open licences are critical for defining Open Educational Resources. The goal of this article is to explain the logic of open licensing to teachers, funders, and educational policy‐makers – to explain the relatively simple but vital considerations that are necessary to build this global educational commons of free learning material. In particular, we will stress the importance of ensuring that supposedly ‘free’ materials are not restricted by seemingly reasonable licensing decisions. <s> BIB005 </s> Questions of Quality in Repositories of Open Educational Resources: A Literature Review. <s> Research in Learning Technology <s> Open educational resources (OER) are a global phenomenon that is fast gaining credibility in many academic circles as a possible solution for bridging the knowledge divide. With increased funding and advocacy from governmental and nongovernmental organisations paired with generous philanthropy, many OER repositories, which host a vast array of resources, have mushroomed over the years. As the inkling towards an open approach to education grows, many academics are contributing to these OER repositories, making them expand exponentially in volume. However, despite the volume of available OER, the uptake of the use and reuse of OER still remains slow. One of the major limitations inhibiting the wider adoption of OER is the inability of current search mechanisms to effectively locate OER that are most suitable for use and reuse within a given scenario. This is mainly due to the lack of a parametric measure that could be used by search technologies to autonomously identify desirable resources. As a possible solution to this limitation, this concept paper introduces a parametric measure of desirability of OER named the D-index, which can aid search mechanisms in better identifying resources suitable for use and reuse. <s> BIB006 </s> Questions of Quality in Repositories of Open Educational Resources: A Literature Review. <s> Research in Learning Technology <s> The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has built up a record of experience and achievements since it was formed 10 years ago as an identifiable approach to sharing online learning materials. In its initial phase, much activity was driven by ideals and interest in finding new ways to release content, with less direct research and reflection on the process. It is now important to consider the impact of OER and the types of evidence that are being generated across initiatives, organisations and individuals. Drawing on the work of OLnet ( http://olnet.org ) in bringing people together through fellowships, research projects and supporting collective intelligence about OER, we discuss the key challenges facing the OER movement. We go on to consider these challenges in the context of another project, Bridge to Success ( http://b2s.aacc.edu ), identifying the services which can support open education in the future. Keywords: OER, policy, open education, services, reflection, collective intelligence <s> BIB007
Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2014, 22: 20889 -http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v22.20889 been designed for use in teaching and learning) that are openly available for use by educators and students, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees. (p. 5) The philosophy of the OER movement has consisted from the outset of two fundamental concepts: free and open access to knowledge, and the capacity to adapt and reuse to create new materials BIB006 . For BIB001 , At the heart of the movement toward Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world's knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse it. (p. 8) The OER movement aims to facilitate the democratisation of knowledge by increasing the circulation and reuse of free, quality content in a variety of formats, without economic or legal barriers  BIB002 BIB004 BIB007 . The most defining, common feature across the multitude of resources described by the umbrella term OER is therefore openness, which crucially indicates 'openly licensed' rather than simply 'freely available'. As the Paris OER Declaration indicates, OER must reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license, such as creative commons licence (CCL), that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work.  The OECD (2007) have also cited open licensing as a legal driver of OER, with specific reference to 'new legal means to create and distribute open tools and content through licensing schemes such as Creative Commons' (p. 59). It seems that although OER could potentially be released under some other type of open license, in practice it is Creative Commons that is discussed in the literature. Released in 2002, the Creative Commons licensing (CCL) scheme aims to facilitate the transfer, sharing, use and adaptation of academic and creative content, while protecting the intellectual property rights of the authors. CCL is often regarded as at the heart of OER openness as it facilitates the adaptation and modification of the resources BIB005 The value of ROER is thus in relation to the need to open and democratise access to teaching resources, promoting the growth and dissemination of knowledge as a free resource, and removing the traditional copyright barrier, thus aiding in the transformation of the teacher's role from a content producer to 'user-producer' (OECD 2007; UNESCO 2011) . McGreal (2011) argues that ROER can be important resources for students and academics, dependent on the quality of the resources stored in the repositories; however, according to Butcher, Kanwar, and Uvalić-Trumbić (2011) , in the OER environment, resource quality will 'be assisted by the development of such repositories, which will provide at least first levels of quality assurance' (p. 2). Housing resources within ROER is advantageous because the centralisation of resources facilitates retrieval, and widens access; furthermore, if a social layer is included, it encourages collaboration as users feel part of a community of practice   BIB003 .