Explains the new international recommendation in relation to open educational resources, covering scope, evidence, decision authority.
The recommendation adopted on 25 November 2019 provides the immediate context for open educational resources. The central issue is the meaning of the expectation in practice, including its scope, the evidence needed to demonstrate it and the circumstances in which it may not apply. The decision should address both public impact and the responsibilities attached to entrusted educational resources. System context should determine the appropriate administrative arrangement within the governing requirements.
Meaning in practice
The recommendation adopted on 25 November 2019 provides a policy reference for open educational resources. This distinction protects learners from overstated claims and enables providers to plan against a defined obligation.
Responsibilities and material risks
Open access can widen participation, but users require clear information about authorship, licence, quality, accessibility, maintenance and the status of any learning or assessment.
When examining open educational resources, analysis should make its decision rule explicit. The subject should be examined as a connected system of policy, people, resources, decisions and evidence. Individually sound controls may not operate effectively when decisions, records or responsibility pass between functions. Comparable evidence should be assessed against criteria settled before the result is known.
- Who controls each stage?
- What action is required by the finding?
- Which evidence establishes operation?
- Where do exceptions occur?
- What outcome is intended?
Basis for a reliable conclusion
As regards open educational resources, responsibility should be identifiable at the point where consequential decisions are made. Evidence is sufficient when it is current, attributable, representative of the relevant scope and capable of being reconciled with other available records. Within the scope under review, escalation should follow whenever the available record cannot support a safe conclusion for the affected learners.
The principal risks in relation to the matter are outdated or inaccurate material, unclear permission to reuse or adapt, inaccessible resources, and uncertain responsibility for learner support. For open educational resources, the relationship between the risks is material: one failed safeguard may remove the evidence needed to activate another. Documents should be tested against the decision process they record and the outcome that followed.
Maintaining effective oversight
In the context of open educational resources, each source should have a stated purpose in supporting or limiting the conclusion. The most relevant material is likely to include version and maintenance information, use and completion data interpreted cautiously, academic and technical review, and licence and provenance records.
Implementation of the applicable expectation can be tested without imposing unnecessary reporting. For the control, the reviewer should map the complete process, identify the intended result and responsible authority at each stage, and test normal cases together with exceptions. The conclusion should differentiate an individual error from evidence of a wider control weakness. When examining open educational resources, information should not be treated as sufficient merely because it is already available; its relevance to the present question must be established.
Interpretation of open educational resources should produce a test that another competent reviewer can apply to comparable evidence.
Maintaining effective oversight
Care is required in drawing conclusions about open educational resources. Availability is not equivalent to accessibility, participation or learning. Each outcome requires separate evidence. For the applicable expectation, the volume of documentation is not a measure of conformity. Relevance, integrity and coverage are more important than the number of records produced. Limitations should be prominent wherever the finding may influence a consequential decision.
Within the scope under review, decisions concerning the control should remain traceable to the information available for the stated reference period. For open educational resources, a revision should state whether the change concerns the underlying condition, the evidence, the method or the interpretation.
Where responsibilities for delivery relating to open educational resources are shared with partners, suppliers or several public bodies, responsibility should be mapped across the complete service. Agreements governing open educational resources should allocate information exchange, incident escalation, learner communication, record custody and corrective authority. Protection should operate across the complete service, irrespective of how delivery is divided.
For decisions concerning open educational resources, progress should not be assessed by the amount of policy or documentation produced. The measure is demonstrated public benefit, including detection and correction of material variation.