Creating and sharing OER in primary and secondary education: challenges and strategies

- Open Educational Resources in the Catalan Educational Network (XTEC)
  + Open source authoring tools and associated repositories: JClic[1], QV[2], La Prestatgeria [3]
  + Alexandria: Repository of Moodle and IWB resources [4]
  + edu365.cat: Student's portal for primary and secondary education [5]
  + edu3.cat: Repository of video and audio productions [6]
  + Merlí: Bank of LOM metadata, search engine and structured resource organizer [7]
  + Agrega: Authoring tool and federated network of SCORM resources [8] (Catalan node in progress)
  + LRE: European network of OER repositories [9]

- Main strengths and features of OER
  + Teachers are (usually) enthusiastically engaged with the creation, sharing, adaptation and use of OER
  + Wide range of contents, formats and topics covered.
  + OER can fit well into specific curricular needs.
  + Budget savings

- Main weaknesses and challenges
  + Irregular quality of resources
  + Copyright issues in assets used in some OER created by teachers: lack of knowledge about legal issues
  + Resources with poor or null metadata
  + Some repositories have oversized metadata profiles
  + Dispersion of formats and publishing platforms
  + Interoperability issues (also using standards!)
  + Lack of feedback. Users can comment and rate resources, but usually don't do it

- Current strategies and actions
  + Enforcement of Merli as a common pool of metadata from all repositories, and central search engine
  + Linking of networks and repositories, allowing extended and specialized search of resources
  + Simplification of user interfaces and metadata mandatory schemas. Tagging must be easy for teachers.
  + Official recognition of the work made by authors of OER. Awards and featured resources.
  + More information about legal issues, copyright, licensing, user and author rights and duties related to OER in in-service teacher training programs
  + Use of virtual learning environments like Moodle [10] [11] as a central point of delivery and interaction with OER

[1] http://clic.xtec.cat/en
[2] http://clic.xtec.cat/qv_web/en
[3] http://phobos.xtec.cat/llibres
[4] http://alexandria.xtec.cat
[5] http://www.edu365.cat
[6] http://edu3.cat
[7] http://merli.xtec.cat
[8] http://www.proyectoagrega.es
[9] http://lreforschools.eun.org
[10] http://www.moodle.org
[11] http://agora.xtec.cat

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