For a successful implementation of a common quality standard in the OER community, a sustainable
quality concept for OER must consider both the appropriateness and the formal quality. The
perceived appropriateness depends significantly on the production scenario, the particular educational
context in which an OER is to be repurposed, and the resource type. We have been able to
show that there are substantial differences between the common scenarios of professional content
creation and OER production as well as between the conditions for usage of commercial content Fostering the Exploitation of Open Educational Resources 215
Open Praxis, vol. 6 issue 3, July–September 2014, pp. 205–220
and of OER. We mentioned but did not further consider the fact that many OER were never designed
as such during the production process but subsequently declared to be OER by their original
producers. This surely is another aspect that influences the OER-community’s level of acceptance
regarding the implementation of standards and the definition of standardized metadata and
documentations. Even though the declaration of a learning resource to become an OER and its
uploading to make it openly available are big decisions, little additional efforts are required. It is
unlikely that the common OER authors (who are practitioners) and publishers (which might be
educational institutions on all levels) will purchase costly standardization documents and invest
the time that is required to study, comprehend, and implement them. Thus, if we wish to achieve
commonly accepted quality standards in the context of the OER community, new concepts for their
design and exploitation might be required.
The second issue we found can be understood as an alternative concept to a comprehensive
context description. Following this minimalist concept, an “appropriate OER” must be understood
as a document that at least allows re-purposers to modify contents on both the legal (by license)
and the technical (by format) level. This should be supported with a definition of the file format
and in particular, a recommendation of an application that allows conducting modifications. The
corresponding criteria for the quality of OER are not limited to the resources’ changeability but to
the proper description if (and by using which software) it actually is adaptable. In terms of quality,
these issues define a minimum-quality approach, are easily manageable (and acceptable) for
everyone, and thus, should be demanded for OER, at least as a good style recommendation. Within
the common standards, e. g., the ISO/IEC 19788-1:2011, this solution could easily be adopted as
an OER-related subset of mandatory metadata fields and prove highly supportive for the further
exploitation of OER.