With the introduction of the Web 2.0 philosophy in the learning arena, the way learning actors interact has changed substantially. From a collaborative perspective, all the actors in the learning landscape could make use of a variety of tools for collaboration, making up what it is called: “collaborative learning 2.0.” In this chapter, the discussion is focused on the open educational resources (OER), concretely open assessment resources, i.e., open resources used in the assessment process (formative and/or summative). The authors explore the way to create, share, search, manage, and access to these resources; all these actions are described from the context of collaboration inherited from the Web 2.0 paradigms: collaboration among teachers and course designers, teachers and learners, and any other factors that could arise in the assessment process. On the other hand, the approach to managing the open assessment resources is based on an outcome-based assessment process because of the great importance of the outcome-based learning.
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The usage of a repository of assessment resources matches up with the collaboration Web 2.0 philosophy. Several teachers from several institutions can author assessment resources collaboratively, improve not-up-to-date material, share it with the community, provide comments about the usage of some resources like the learners performance or peer review other’s resources: the possibilities are almost infinite. On the other hand, learners could also drive their own learning using self-assessment resources or providing feedback of their experience with some resources. Therefore, here we are presenting an eminently collaborative tool.
Sharing assessment resources among teachers and course developers is a feature that has a great potential. The exposition in this article tries to shed some light over this feature and provides a solution by means of an application prototype. The learning management systems (LMSs) are the entry point for the mentioned stakeholders to the educational resources used by an institution. A possible solution for sharing assessment resources among LMSs would be to use an information repository, such as the Open ICOPER Content Space (henceforth referred to as OICS). By doing so, assessment content and information could be centralized and the material would be accessible from any other platform. All contents could be downloaded from a single centralized site, thus simplifying the integration of different LMS and interoperability.
The repositories of educational resources enhance some e-learning processes like the collaborative authoring of resources by several teachers, the communication between teachers and learners and the enrichment of educational resources by means of annotations (teacher reflections, learner feedback, peer review comments).
The Open ICOPER Content Space (OICS) is an open repository of educational resources that permits teachers and learners create, share, enrich and reuse any kind of learning materials. The educational resources the OICS manages range from instructional design resources (e.g. learning designs, teaching methods and assessment methods), learning outcome definitions, learner assessment resources to learner’s achieved learning outcomes.
As the Bologna process has led to the re-production of several learning programs in many European institutions, the objective of this tool is supporting content authors in this endeavour. Due to the learner assessment is a key process and it has to focus on learning outcomes, the utility of this tool for course developers is unquestionable.
The objectives of this article are:
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Show the importance of the outcome-based assessment process
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How an Open Educational Repository could support teachers and course developers in the planning and design of the outcome-based assessment
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Introduce an actual implementation of these concepts in the .LRN platform