Table of contents:
1. Open educational resources based on Mediawiki software or Wikipedia?
4.4. Reliability of information
4.5. Topicality of information
4.6. Students’ perception of quality
4.7. Processes of ensuring quality
4.9. Quality criteria for university use of OER
4. Quality
4.7. Processes of ensuring quality
OER WMS offer a wide range of options and processes for ensuring quality. This ranges from partial or complete restrictions to edit individual sections to software to detect unsuitable content such as plagiarism and classic mechanisms to ensure quality such as peer-review processes or citation of authors. In order to ensure the quality of OER WMS, various criteria can be used (see the Table below).
Table. Possible quality criteria for OER, which function on MediaWiki software for university purposes and their description.
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Description of criteria |
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License tagging Licensing a resource under an open license is the basic condition for it to be labelled and used as OER. If it is licensed in this manner but not labelled, those who don’t know about the license cannot use it as such. Therefore, tagging the license for all materials that are under an open license (or within the whole resource) is important for dissemination. |
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Date of creation Tagging the date of the resource’s creation is a key sign of quality for its use or its citation in other resources. |
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Last update Just like tagging the date of creation, the tagging of the last update is an important criterion for quality. |
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Page version and edit history If a source is to be cited in a scientific work, it is better to cite the ID version of the page than the time it was accessed. The source may be updated very quickly, especially in the case of current events. Two changes can take place on Wikipedia within one minute. Authorship The author’s reputation is an important criterion of quality both in printed and online resources. Authorship labelling is a factor that can be used to differentiate various OER projects based on MediaWiki software from Wikipedia. |
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Review A peer-review process is one of the primary criteria of quality in the academic environment. Peer-reviewed publications by relevant experts are more respected by those that are not reviewed. Therefore, it is ideal when OER for university purposes allow for a peer-review process and its tagging (e.g. stating the article was reviewed by a relevant expert). Peer-review of OER can be done both by an editorial team in the form of internal community reviewing or by addressing external experts. |
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Tagging of quality by creators Do creators in some way label the quality of specific materials? E.g. in the form of recommendations by experts in the given field? |
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Sustainability This criterion answers whether the project functions at present or whether it is only online but not being maintained. Updating OER to include the newest information is the primary advantage of these resources over traditional materials. If materials have been made within a project that are no longer being edited or updated with the newest knowledge, it can be assumed that the quality of these materials will decrease. |
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Balance This criterion shows whether the quality of individual sections of texts significantly varies, e.g. whether the resource contains erroneous or outdated sections (but not incomplete ones waiting to be processed) next to properly created ones. |
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Quality assessment by users This criterion denotes the option for users to assess the quality of materials. It also provides the creators with feedback on whether the resources they are creating are seen by users to be of good quality. This also helps continually analyze the satisfaction of the target group. |