Using Quality Criteria for Assessing and Comparing Open Courseware

Despite the momentum of the open courseware movement around the world, no quality criteria and metrics for evaluation of open courseware or open educational resources’ repositories are available yet. Therefore, learners and instructors have no support and guidance in their quest for locating the most suitable learning resource that fulfills their educational aims. The same is true for developers, who have no guidelines for designing and building such educational resources. We present here an evaluation and comparison between two open courseware on data structures and algorithms, which are available from two important open courseware providers and that comply with different open courseware paradigms. Both evaluation and comparison rely on our socioconstructivist quality model, which consists of a set of quality criteria that serve as general guidelines for development, use, modification, evaluation, and comparison of open educational resources and open courseware.