Open Educational Resources have fundamentally disrupted traditional textbook markets by eliminating copyright-based access barriers and enabling educators to customize materials for their specific contexts. However, this democratization of content creation has introduced a paradox: while OER reduce financial barriers to educational access, they simultaneously raise questions about quality assurance. Unlike traditional textbooks vetted by established publishers with reputational incentives and standardized quality control processes, OER emerge from diverse sources—individual faculty, institutional initiatives, grassroots communities, and nonprofit organizations—with varying quality standards and expertise.
The perception that “free” educational materials are inherently lower quality represents one of the most significant barriers to widespread OER adoption. Research indicates that quality concerns and skepticism about whether available OER meet disciplinary standards consistently emerge as primary obstacles to faculty adoption. Addressing this concern requires establishing transparent, rigorous, and credible quality assurance mechanisms that provide reliable signals to educators about OER suitability for their specific educational contexts.
A critical distinction must be recognized: OER quality assurance differs fundamentally from quality control of traditional commercial textbooks. While commercial publishers exercise pre-publication editorial control and remain static until new editions, OER are designed to be continuously improved through community contribution and real-world feedback. This evolutionary model enables rapid error correction and ongoing enhancement but also complicates traditional quality assessment frameworks that assume materials are finalized products rather than living documents.
Foundational Quality Assessment Frameworks: The TIPS Model
Among the most rigorously validated quality assurance frameworks for OER is the TIPS Quality Assurance Framework, developed through extensive international consultation and research validation. TIPS comprises four core dimensions addressing comprehensive quality assessment:
Teaching and Learning (T) encompasses pedagogical effectiveness—whether materials support defined learning objectives, include appropriate instructional design, facilitate active learning, and enable assessment of student mastery. This dimension addresses questions such as: Are learning outcomes clearly defined? Do materials support diverse learning styles? Are assessment mechanisms aligned to objectives?
Information and Material Content (I) evaluates the accuracy, comprehensiveness, currentness, and appropriateness of substantive material. Specifically, this dimension examines whether content is accurate and unbiased, covers the subject matter comprehensively, remains current without becoming obsolete quickly, and is appropriately pitched for the target audience.
Presentation, Product, and Format (P) assesses the clarity, organization, usability, and accessibility of materials in their final form. Questions include: Is the material presented in accessible language? Is the organization logical and intuitive? Are navigation and interface elements clear? Is multimedia content properly functioning?
System, Technical, and Technological Aspects (S) evaluates technical quality, platform functionality, compatibility across devices and browsers, and compliance with technological standards. This dimension ensures that materials function correctly, are accessible across various technical environments, and incorporate emerging technologies appropriately.
Importantly, the TIPS Framework was validated through rigorous Delphi methodology by international OER experts, producing a content validity index exceeding 0.80 after refinement—a statistically robust threshold for framework reliability. The framework was subsequently tested with school teachers internationally, both unfamiliar with OER and representing end-user perspectives, and demonstrated high construct validity and practical applicability.
Established Repository Peer Review Systems: MERLOT as the Gold Standard
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) operates the most sophisticated and disciplinary-focused peer review system for OER, providing a valuable model for understanding contemporary quality assurance practice. MERLOT’s approach demonstrates how to scale rigorous academic peer review across diverse disciplines while maintaining disciplinary standards and transparency.
MERLOT’s structure comprises discipline-specific editorial boards for major subject areas, each setting standards appropriate to their field and overseeing evaluation processes. When learning objects are added to MERLOT, editorial board members triage submissions to identify materials warranting peer review, prioritizing resources meeting high initial quality standards.
The actual peer review process assigns two qualified educators in the discipline to each resource selected for review. Reviewers operate independently initially, then collaborate to create a composite review addressing three core evaluation categories:
Content Quality examines the accuracy, currency, comprehensiveness, and appropriateness of material for the stated target audience.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching/Learning Tool assesses whether materials effectively support the stated learning objectives and facilitate student mastery.
Ease of Use evaluates accessibility, navigation, functionality, and practical usability for instructors and students.
Each category receives individual numerical ratings, allowing MERLOT to communicate nuanced quality assessments rather than binary pass/fail judgments. Crucially, MERLOT posts only reviews with ratings of 3 or higher on a 5-point scale, sending lower reviews directly to authors privately. This approach balances transparency—informing potential users about resource quality—with constructive feedback that supports authors in improvement without discouraging contribution.
Authors receive reviews before publication and may respond to reviewers’ suggestions or request letters summarizing their material’s peer review outcomes for use in academic contexts (promotion, tenure, grant applications). This recognition of scholarly contribution within the peer review process provides academic incentive for quality OER development.
The Open Textbook Library: Community-Driven Quality Assessment
The Open Textbook Library adopts a distinct quality assurance approach emphasizing community evaluation over formal peer review, reflecting a pragmatic recognition that recruiting sufficient disciplinary experts for all OER submissions strains available resources. The OTL establishes basic inclusion criteria allowing broad contributions while implementing robust evaluation through user community feedback.
The OTL’s 10-criteria review rubric provides structured evaluation guidance covering both content quality and usability:
Comprehensiveness: Materials cover the subject appropriately with effective indexes and glossaries.
Content Accuracy: Information is accurate, error-free, and unbiased.
Relevance and Longevity: Content remains current without quickly becoming obsolete; updates are straightforward to implement.
Clarity: Writing is lucid and accessible; jargon receives adequate context.
Consistency: Terminology and conceptual frameworks remain consistent throughout.
Modularity: Materials are easily divisible into smaller reading units without disruption.
Organization and Flow: Topics are presented logically and clearly.
Interface Quality: No significant navigation problems, image distortion, or display issues exist.
Grammatical Accuracy: The text contains minimal grammatical errors.
Notably, OTL allows crowdsourced evaluation by educators using materials in actual courses—potentially the most meaningful quality assessment mechanism. Educator reviews following the standard rubric accumulate over time, creating aggregated quality signals reflecting real-world usage experience. Analysis of 954 reviews across 235 open textbooks in the OTL found that reviewers consistently evaluated materials favorably when adopted, with reviews emphasizing content comprehensiveness, accuracy, and pedagogical effectiveness. This crowdsourced model has produced over 2,000 reviews as of recent updates, creating substantial quality information resources for potential adopters.
The Comprehensive OER Evaluation Rubric: Multi-Dimensional Assessment
A validated 41-criteria rubric developed through expert consultation and empirical validation provides a comprehensive assessment framework more granular than TIPS while maintaining practical usability. This rubric addresses multiple performance levels for each criterion rather than binary pass/fail judgments, allowing nuanced quality assessment.
The rubric encompasses pedagogical elements (alignment to objectives, engagement, assessment validity), content elements (accuracy, comprehensiveness, appropriateness), technical elements (functionality, accessibility, usability), and design elements (organization, visual quality, multimedia appropriateness). Expert judges validated the criteria through consensus processes, ensuring that all included criteria represent essential quality dimensions in OER.
Practical OER Evaluation Frameworks for Institutional Implementation
Several institutions have developed practical evaluation checklists supporting institutional quality assurance without requiring extensive specialist expertise:
The Indiana University Libraries OER Evaluation Checklist guides educators through quality assessment across multiple dimensions.
Forsyth Library’s Evaluating OER Checklist provides additional structured guidance.
The Open Textbook Rubric from College Libraries Ontario focuses specifically on open textbooks.
The Prince George’s Community College Comprehensive OER Evaluation Tool offers detailed institutional guidance.
These frameworks share common elements: content accuracy and appropriateness assessment, pedagogical effectiveness evaluation, technical functionality verification, accessibility compliance checking, and usability and navigation assessment. By democratizing quality assessment, these checklists enable individual educators and institutions to apply rigorous standards without specialized training.
Accessibility as a Core Quality Dimension
A critical and often underemphasized aspect of OER quality assurance involves accessibility compliance—ensuring materials are usable by students with disabilities. This represents both a quality imperative (materials inaccessible to portions of the student population are lower quality) and a legal requirement under laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 from the World Wide Web Consortium establish internationally recognized accessibility standards with three compliance levels:
WCAG Level A represents baseline accessibility, addressing essential barriers for users with disabilities.
WCAG Level AA (the most commonly targeted level) provides substantially broader access, particularly for assistive technology users, and is mandated in most legal compliance requirements.
WCAG Level AAA represents advanced accessibility, accommodating the broadest range of users and assistive technologies.
The Curating OER – Accessibility Checklist from College Libraries Ontario and the Accessibility Toolkit from BCcampus provide practical guidance for assessing and implementing accessibility in OER. Accessibility assessment should verify that:
- Materials can be navigated using keyboard alone (essential for users unable to use mice)
- Text alternatives exist for all images and multimedia (for screen reader users)
- Color is not the only means of conveying information
- Videos include captions (for deaf and hard-of-hearing users) and audio descriptions (for blind users)
- Materials are readable by screen reader technology
- Content organization is logical and can be navigated programmatically
- Sufficient color contrast exists between text and background
Importantly, accessibility is not an “add-on” to quality but a fundamental dimension of it. OER that are perfectly accurate and pedagogically sound but inaccessible to students with disabilities are objectively lower quality from an equity perspective.
Continuous Improvement: Beyond Static Quality Assessment
A distinctive advantage of OER over static commercial textbooks lies in their capacity for continuous improvement through community feedback and iterative enhancement. Rather than waiting years for new editions, OER can be updated immediately when errors are identified, new research emerges, or pedagogical approaches improve.
David Wiley articulates a sophisticated model for OER continuous improvement based on three elements: First, permission to make changes—the copyright licensing essential to OER nature that permits anyone to adapt and improve materials; Second, capacity for measurement—the ability to instrument OER to assess effectiveness in supporting student learning outcomes; and Third, action—using measurement results to identify underperforming elements and implement evidence-based improvements.
The continuous improvement cycle involves: instrumenting OER for measurement, measuring effectiveness in supporting learning outcomes, identifying areas requiring improvement, making data-informed design changes, and measuring the impact of those changes to confirm whether modifications actually improved student outcomes. This evidence-based approach to improvement transforms OER from static products into adaptive, learning systems that evolve based on real-world effectiveness data.
However, continuous improvement requires active commitment, preventing OER from degrading into unmaintained repositories of outdated materials. Institutions should establish mechanisms to systematically collect and incorporate user feedback, monitor technological changes requiring updates, address identified errors promptly, and coordinate community contributions toward improvement rather than fragmenting OER into incompatible versions.
Challenges and Weaknesses in OER Quality Assurance Systems
Despite robust frameworks and established peer review mechanisms, significant challenges limit OER quality assurance effectiveness:
Resource constraints: Recruiting qualified peer reviewers is substantially more difficult than commercial publishing achieves through financial incentive. Many repositories struggle to maintain adequate reviewer pools, resulting in significant backlogs and gaps in coverage.
Temporal mismatch: While commercial publications remain static between editions, OER continuously evolve, meaning peer reviews capture only snapshots and may not reflect current versions. Users reading materials that have been substantially updated since peer review received assessment based on outdated content.
Posting before review completion: Some repositories post OER before peer review completion, creating ambiguity about which materials have been vetted. Administrators seeking to mark reviewed materials must track evolving statuses.
Lack of standardization: Without universal quality standards, different repositories employ different rubrics, criteria, and reviewer qualifications, complicating cross-platform comparisons and institutional guidance.
Discoverability challenges: Even when quality assessment occurs, potential users often cannot easily find or access quality information. The most rigorous review provides limited value if educators cannot discover it during resource selection.
Institutional misalignment: Quality assurance designed for traditional academic peer review may not address institutional priorities like pedagogical innovation, cost-effectiveness, or alignment with specific curricula.
Emerging Solutions: Innovation in Quality Frameworks
Recent initiatives address these limitations through innovative approaches:
European Open & Community-Led Quality Review Framework development involves creating consensus-based, integrated quality paradigms and mechanisms supporting OER innovation. This emerging framework acknowledges that quality assessment must evolve beyond traditional measures to address innovation potential and sustainability.
Metadata-based quality assessment using algorithmic evaluation of OER metadata offers scalability advantages over manual review, enabling rapid assessment of large repositories. While not replacing human judgment, metadata analysis can identify likely quality issues and prioritize materials for human review.
Crowdsourced evaluation enhancement through structured feedback from educators using OER in actual courses provides authentic quality signals reflecting real-world effectiveness. Aggregating educator feedback creates continuously updated quality information rather than static reviews.
Quality frameworks addressing institutional innovation recognize that OER serve not only as affordable alternatives to traditional materials but as catalysts for pedagogical innovation, assessment redesign, and open educational practices. Quality assurance should assess innovation potential alongside traditional dimensions.
Practical Implementation: Institutional Quality Assurance Strategy
Educational institutions adopting OER should establish comprehensive quality assurance strategies addressing multiple layers:
Institutional OER vetting processes establish written criteria aligned to institutional standards, assigning qualified faculty or librarians to evaluate candidates using established rubrics before official recommendation. This localizes quality judgment, ensuring alignment with institutional pedagogies and learner populations.
Librarian-led discovery and evaluation leverages librarians’ expertise in identifying and assessing resources, reducing faculty time burden and improving discovery efficiency.
Faculty peer review involving discipline experts in quality assessment ensures credibility and appropriate disciplinary standards, though requiring sufficient incentive and recognition to sustain participation.
Student feedback integration soliciting learner perspectives on OER usability and effectiveness provides valuable quality signals from end users.
Accessibility audits verifying WCAG compliance ensure inclusive design and legal compliance.
Regular review cycles updating quality assessments annually or biennially account for OER evolution and changing institutional needs.
Recognition and incentive structures formally crediting quality assessment work as scholarly contribution encourages sustained participation and signal quality commitment.
Summary: Quality Assurance as Core OER Value
Quality assurance mechanisms distinguish high-quality, professionally developed OER from ad-hoc amateur resources, addressing persistent adoption barriers stemming from quality skepticism. Established frameworks like MERLOT’s disciplinary peer review, the Open Textbook Library’s crowdsourced evaluation, and the TIPS Quality Assurance Framework provide proven approaches adaptable to institutional contexts.
The future of OER quality assurance lies in hybrid models combining formal peer review for foundational quality signals, crowdsourced feedback capturing real-world effectiveness, continuous improvement mechanisms leveraging permission to update materials, and metadata-based algorithmic assessment enabling scalability. Importantly, quality assurance should not simply replicate traditional publishing models but should leverage OER’s unique advantages—the capacity for rapid improvement, community contribution, and accessibility enhancement—to create quality standards appropriate to openly licensed, continuously evolving educational materials. Institutions investing in transparent, rigorous, well-communicated quality assurance mechanisms unlock a primary driver of OER adoption and build faculty confidence in OER effectiveness and appropriateness for academic use.