FACILITATING CURATION OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES THROUGH THE USE OF AN APPLICATION-LINKED REPOSITORY

Open educational resources (OER) refer to any kind of learning and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under a broad open license. The Paris OER Declaration of 2012 provided a set of recommendations to foster the sustainable development of quality learning resources through the adoption of appropriate standards to encourage open licensing of educational materials produced with public funds. Since January 2017 the authors are involved in a Horizon 2020 project, Up to University (Up2U), aimed at developing an innovative ecosystem to facilitate open design and use of digital content adapted for high school students preparing for University. Following the guidelines and recommendations from various organizations (UNESCO and the EU among others), we need to adopt clear licensing as well as sound copyright policies. Furthermore, rights including permissions, access control and (when needed) anonymity must be carefully designed and thoroughly upheld. Besides meeting compliance with guidelines, resolutions, and recommendations from international agencies, adopting effective curation policies becomes paramount to ensuring the sustainability of the project. In this paper, we present a novel approach to curation of open educational resources, in which an application-linked repository plays a key role as the integrator of the other components of an OER based e-learning service: Open Content Creation, Learning Management System (LMS), and Data Analytics. Once this application-linked repository takes its place as the central unit of the learning resources management, curation policies and procedures become embedded in the operational workflow of the OER based e-learning service in a seamless way. We believe that our approach will not only be useful for our project but also for any other OER initiative.