Discoverability of OER: The Case of Language OER

Abstract

One of the obstacles that prevent the widespread adoption of Open Educa-tional Resources (OER) is the difficulty to find appropriate OER for specif-ic educational objectives. This paper investigates this discoverability prob-lem by searching for OER in eleven well-known Repositories of OER (ROER). The search for “Language Game” and “Italian Language” OER was used as a case study. The search found very few useful language OER in these ROER. Also, it revealed a number of obstacles in finding appropriate OER such as absence of a uniform structure of ROER, absence of a uniform OER metadata description, inaccurate, obsolete, and missing metadata de-scriptions of OER, obsolete OER, not really open and free educational re-sources, and more. Finally, the paper makes suggestions for improving both ROER and OER description.