David Wiley: On Quality and OER

David Wiley acerca de la calidad de los recursos educativos abiertos. El estudio de Nature en el que se compararon artículos de la Wikipedia con los de la Encylopedia Britannica, más un experimento mental para disociar calidad y derechos de reproducción.

Because quality is not necessarily a function of copyright status, neither traditionally copyrighted educational materials nor openly licensed educational materials can exclusively claim to be “high quality.” There are terrific commercial textbooks and there are terrific OER. There are also terrible commercial textbooks and terrible OER. Local experts must vet the quality of whatever resources they choose to adopt, and cannot abdicate this responsibility to publishing houses or anyone else.

Pero, sobre todo, se trata de no perder de vista que la calidad no consiste en la presentación de los materiales, sino en su efectividad para el aprendizaje.

There are two ways of thinking about this definition of quality.

• One is to realize that no matter how beautiful and internally consistent their presentation may be, educational materials are low quality if students who are assigned to use them learn little or nothing.
• The other way to think about it is this: no matter how ugly or inconsistent they appear to be, educational materials are high quality if students who are assigned to use them learn what the instructor intended them learn.