Directory of Open Educational Resources (DOER): A discovery service framework to provide structured access to OERs

Abstract

This paper discusses in detail the discoverability problem of OERs which is considered to be one of the major hurdles of user uptake. The paper also discusses the challenges in creating OER discovery services in an environment where non-interoperable OER repositories proliferate. It highlights some of the OER discovery initiatives at the community, national and international levels, and the case of Directory of Open Educational Resources (DOER), a structured discovery platform set up by Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is discussed in detail. DOER has brought most of the OERs available in repositories that are distributed across Commonwealth region into a structured metadata framework and it exposes the curated metadata to other service providers to enhance visibility. In perspective, DOER has demonstrated a frugal approach to creating open infrastructure for OER discovery by exploiting existing open standards and technologies. To solve the problems in OER discovery, authors suggest that OER advocacy should focus on strengthening discoverability features of institutional OER repositories by persuading them to follow open interoperability standards. // Paper ID 93