Pedagogical quality enrichment in OER-based courseware: Guiding principles

This is a critical phase for Open Educational Resources (OER) movement: on one side the number of OER is increasing rapidly, and on other side debates about quality of OER-based courseware are heating up. These debates emanate from the fact that OER-based courseware are supposed to help users to follow a logical learning path and get an engaging, interactive, and enjoyable learning experience. There are two aspects of quality assurance in OER-based courseware: content and pedagogy. The content aspect primarily rests with subject experts, and pedagogical quality of courseware mainly lies in the hands of developers. Present trends reveal that mainly enthusiasts, working with some support from the institution management are designing and developing OER-based courseware. There seems a possibility that these enthusiasts are developing courseware without undergoing any specific courseware development training, and in the absence of proper knowledge and training about pedagogy, one can not be sure that the produced courseware will be of superior quality. In this backdrop, present paper discusses and details about a number of guiding principles for enrichment of pedagogical quality in OER-based courseware.